Folio Society, 1961, 407 pages, brown cloth binding, illustrated, drawings by Mervyn Peake, condition: as new.
From the great French novelist comes this long-unavailable collection of tales in the tradition of Boccaccios Decameron.
Balzacs Contes Drolatiques, or Droll Stories, were originally published in three volumes in the 1830s. Set in medieval Europe, these stories were Balzacs attempt to write in the great tradition of Rabelais and Boccaccio, to render the Middle Ages with a touch of raunchy humor, and to provide a delightful portrait of medieval France. Balzac took the old themes that had delighted his ancestors, the tales of faithless wives and confiding husbands, of monks incredibly endowed for amorous athleticism, of lusty wenches and adventurous lads, and of great bouts of eating and drinking. Droll Stories has always been an essential part of Balzacs work when published in French, but it has been excluded from the definitive English editions.
Honoré de Balzac (1799 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus.
Owing to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well; the city of Paris, a backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities. His writing influenced many famous writers, including the novelists Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James, and filmmakers François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. Many of Balzac's works have been made into films and continue to inspire other writers. James called him "really the father of us all."
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