Finished Balzac's Le Père Goriot this afternoon, and what a read it was! Incredibly overwrought in every way you can think of, yet utterly compelling, even at its most melodramatic - and there's lots of that: the death of Goriot, the arrest of Vautrin, the betrayal of... just about everyone.
How does Balzac get away with it? I suppose it's down to two entirely conflicting aspects of his work. On the one hand, there's the larger than life poetic truth of it all - Goriot as Lear; on the other, there's the obsessive realism. Balzac is even more concerned with exact amounts of money than Trollope, and that's really saying something. And on that note, thank goodness for the excellent Penguin edition and its wonderfully thorough notes - I didn't follow all the financial stuff exactly, but I could have done if I'd wanted to (too busy wanting to know what happens next to slow down) and I got enough of the gist to make sense of it all.
I suppose a parallel with Trollope isn't too fanciful, come to think of it, but whereas as the English novelist is relaxing and sort of English, Balzac is manically hyper and very, very French.
Wonderful stuff! I'm a fan on first acquaintance.
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