Ron Peters's Reviews > Old Goriot

I’m glad I finally read some Balzac; he’s a very able writer, with incisive, well-selected portraits of human behavior, all crafted with wry and somewhat darkly humorous undertones.

Goriot is, more or less, the tale of King Lear and his daughters, reset in a cheap and moldering garret in nineteenth-century Paris. You can add to this a large helping of Les Liaisons Dangereuses to construct the coldly glittering upper-class moral environment of his heartless daughters. I was going to say that, lastly, you need to add a large dollop of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, but I noticed that Crime and Punishment was published thirty years after Goriot. So, it's fair to say that Eugene Rastignac’s conscience-torn life served, instead, as a model for Dostoevsky. Goriot has one of the best last pages of any book I've read in ages.

I picked this book up as a teenager but only read a few pages; that’s my gain today. After finishing Goriot, I downloaded a free copy of Balzac’s Rabelaisian Droll Stories Collected from the Abbeys of Touraine (Balzac was born and raised in Tours), which I also plan to read.