This classic work of social satire, carnal desire, greed, and obsession is both an exquisitely drawn portrayal of private life and an extraordinary document of post-revolutionary France. Many people (among them Henry James) have considered Honoré de Balzac to be the greatest of all novelists. Eugénie Grandet, his spare, classical story of a girl whose life is blighted by her father's hysterical greed, goes a long way to justifying that opinion. One of the most magnificent of his tales of early nineteenth-century French provincial life, this novel is the work of a writer on whom nothing was lost, and who represents most fully the ability of the human animal to understand and illuminate its own condition. 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

Honore ́De Balzac; translated by Lowell Bair with an introduction by Milton Crane

Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850

Listening Library, Incorporated

Random House, Incorporated

Random House AudioBooks

New York: Bantam Books

Bantam classic, Bantam classic, New York, New York State, 1994

United States, United States of America

Obscured text due to sticker cannot remove.
Some texts are closely to the gutter due to tight binding inherent from the source.

Originally published in 1833 as part of Balzac's La Comedie humaine, this translation ©1959 by Bantam Books.

xviii, 233 pages ; 18 cm
Originally published in 1833 as part of Balzac's La Comedie humaine, this translation ©1959 by Bantam Books

2023-06-28