Some have called Honoré de Balzac the “Father of Realist Literature,” a title he seems to share with fellow Frenchman Gustave Flaubert. And Balzac really makes it clear that he thinks he’s showing the reality of 19th century Paris at the beginning of today’s entry, Father Goriot, when the author breaks the fourth wall by declaring that this book is a drama, but it is “not fiction.” Even though, by all definitions, it is fiction. I didn’t mind it, though. Balzac is basically saying here that the events of this book could, and do, happen in his society all the time. This opening author monologue says a lot, and I think most of my issues with this book have to do with what was promised to me by that introduction.
First, Balzac wonders if this book will only be meaningful to people who live in Paris at the time Balzac did, thinking the point will only hit home if you can see the truth in it. At first, I went, “okay, yeah right,” but now, I think he may have been onto something. For one thing, the title itself alludes to the main character. This is likely a translation issue, but I definitely thought Father Goriot was a priest, or some religious figure, because they all call him “Father Goriot.” Then, Balzac sets it up as part of his initial fall from grace, saying they called him that instead of “Monsieur Goriot,” but I never quite got where the insult was in that statement. Google wasn’t any help, so I don’t have an answer, and this wasn’t just a throwaway line. They allude to the title “Father” being an insult throughout the book but never bring up why. So, with the title alone we have a case of “you had to be there.”
(Also, if anyone has read the book and knows what that was about please tell me I’m still very confused.)
Something else that confused me was the depiction of marriage. A large part of the main plot involved a Great Expectations-style narrative of a young, lower class man learning the ways of the upper classes to woo a lady. In this book, all the rich people’s marriages involved having a spouse and a lover, and it’s treated as common knowledge. The young lead, Eugene, is actively pursuing a married woman to overtly become her lover. It struck me as odd, and I’m not sure if that was commonplace in France at that time, or if Balzac was trying to make a point about marriage through exaggeration. If the latter is the case, it’s frustrating that Balzac would utilize satire in a main point of the book after spending so much time at the beginning boasting about how “real” this book is.
For another thing, Balzac also warns the reader that this story is not a happy one, and is a true classic tragedy, involving the demise of a character coming about from a fatal flaw. In this case, Father Goriot’s fatal flaw is his love for his daughters, who don’t properly appreciate all he has sacrificed (which is quite literally everything) for their happiness. The inevitable conclusion from this doesn’t evoke sadness, but rather frustration. Time after time, Goriot realizes that his daughters don’t appreciate him, and says he will stop ruining himself, only for one of them to come to him with a financial problem two pages later, and he always vows to fix it. You just want to shake him and say, “dude, your daughters married rich. They’re fine, just cut them off already.” Then again, he probably wouldn’t listen anyway.
Another frustrating aspect of this book is the useless B plot. The main plot is interesting enough, but then in a twist, it turns out that one of the side characters is a wanted murderer, who was kind of a dick the whole time, but then he gets arrested and the whole thing takes about forty pages, and really it could have been cut and almost nothing would change. I saw some analyses online trying to connect this character to the two mains, but I think the impact would have been a lot stronger without this distraction.
So, obviously, I’ve never lived in Paris in 1835. I’m also not a historian who has extensively studied the time. I’m no expert. However, as a story from someone hailed as a “father of realism,” and one that the author himself declared as “not a fiction” at the beginning, this didn’t ring very true to me. The characters didn’t seem real, the plot developments felt more like satire of a society than a true picture of it, and overall, I felt my level of care about the characters and story dwindle to nearly nothing by the end.
This book can be found for free online because it’s public domain, and it isn’t really that long, so there’s kind of nothing to lose by seeking this one out, but I still don’t recommend this book. It didn’t live up to its own promise, and I think we can appreciate its place in literary history without all of us needing to read it.
Next time, we fast-forward a century and examine a novel about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Plot Development: 4/10
Resolution: 5/10
Reading experience: 8/20
Personal enjoyment: 12/30
“Respect” points: 5/10
Recommend-ability: 2/10
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