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Ron Peters's Reviews > Cousin Bette
Cousin Bette
by
by
I’m not a fan of the unrelenting grimness of Balzac’s worldview.
The Realist style, a reaction against Romanticism, focused on the unembellished, everyday lives of ordinary people. But this doesn’t imply a need to constantly focus on life’s dark underbelly. I can’t imagine slogging through the nearly one hundred volumes of The Human Comedy. It would be one thing if some redeeming message came from all this suffering but there isn’t any. It’s just grim, grim, grim, for five hundred pages, then it ends, grimly.
Compared with his Father Goriot, Cousin Bette is quite melodramatic and, in some places, nearly hysterical in tone. On the bright side, the plot is complex, the many characters are well-developed, and he’s good on environmental details. The writing style consists of basically a constant alternation between dialogue and description. There is none of the subtlety of “Show, don’t tell” in Balzac. It’s all, “He did this, so he felt that, so she reacted this way, etc.”
It comes down to this not being my cup of tea. He published a book of funny country stories, Les Cent Contes drolatiques, and one edition is even illustrated by Gustave Doré, so I may look for this one day.
The Realist style, a reaction against Romanticism, focused on the unembellished, everyday lives of ordinary people. But this doesn’t imply a need to constantly focus on life’s dark underbelly. I can’t imagine slogging through the nearly one hundred volumes of The Human Comedy. It would be one thing if some redeeming message came from all this suffering but there isn’t any. It’s just grim, grim, grim, for five hundred pages, then it ends, grimly.
Compared with his Father Goriot, Cousin Bette is quite melodramatic and, in some places, nearly hysterical in tone. On the bright side, the plot is complex, the many characters are well-developed, and he’s good on environmental details. The writing style consists of basically a constant alternation between dialogue and description. There is none of the subtlety of “Show, don’t tell” in Balzac. It’s all, “He did this, so he felt that, so she reacted this way, etc.”
It comes down to this not being my cup of tea. He published a book of funny country stories, Les Cent Contes drolatiques, and one edition is even illustrated by Gustave Doré, so I may look for this one day.
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