Eugenie Grandet (The Human Comedy)

Balzac, Honore De

ISBN 10: 014044050X ISBN 13: 9780140440508

Verlag: Penguin Classics, 1955

Inhaltsangabe

L'autor, ens presenta el conflicte provocat per l'enfrontament entre dues personalitats igualment fortes: Félix Grandet, un boter ric i posseït per l'avarícia, i la seva filla única Eugénie, inspirada pels sentiments més purs i despresos. Dues famílies poderoses de la població assetjaran la jove Eugénie amb la intenció d'aconseguir un enllaç matrimonial econòmicament profitós. Però Eugénie no es mostra sensible a segons quina mena de raons.Avarícia i amor són els dos temes centrals de l'obra. L'avarícia és representada pel senyor Grandet, i les seves accions ens fan veure com el diner pot dominar a les persones, les lleis i fins i tot els sentiments. Per altra part l'amor, en la seva vessant més pura, és representat per Eugénie, qui és capaç de donar tot el que posseeix.Aquesta és una novel·la d'amor però també una novel·la de reflexió i crítica sobre el poder del diner, Eugénie Grandet és també la història d'un destí, en aparença gris i dolorós, que troba el seu acompliment en el rebuig de l'egoisme i el materialisme.

Über diesen Titel

Reseña del editor:

Depicting the fatal clash between material desires and the liberating power of human passions, Honoré de Balzac's Eugénie Grandet is translated with an introduction by M.A. Crawford in Penguin Classics.

In a gloomy house in provincial Saumur, the miser Grandet lives with his wife and daughter, Eugénie, whose lives are stifled and overshadowed by his obsession with gold. Guarding his piles of glittering treasures and his only child equally closely, he will let no one near them. But when the arrival of her handsome cousin, Charles, awakens Eugénie's own desires, her passion brings her into a violent collision with her father that results in tragedy for all. Eugénie Grandet is one of the earliest and finest works in Balzac's Comédie humaine cycle, which portrays a society consumed by the struggle to amass wealth and achieve power. Here Grandet embodies both the passionate pursuit of money, and the human cost of avarice.

M. A. Crawford's lucid translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing the irony and psychological insight of Balzac's characterization, the role of fate in the novel, its setting and historical background.

Honoré De Balzac (1799-1850) failed at being a lawyer, publisher, printer, businessman, critic and politician before, at the age of thirty, turning his hand to writing. His life's work, La Comédie humaine, is a series of ninety novels and short stories which offer a magnificent panorama of nineteenth-century life after the French Revolution. Balzac was an influence on innumerable writers who followed him, including Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe.

If you enjoyed Eugenie Grandet you might like Molière's The Miser and Other Plays, also available in Penguin Classics.

Contraportada:

The love of money and a passionate pursuit of it are seen as a driving force in post-Revolutionary France, and are studied in detail in the character of Grandet.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Penguin Classics
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1955
• ISBN 10: 014044050X
• ISBN 13: 9780140440508
• Einband: Rústica
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256