“To open up what society and the novel of manners repress, to stage a kind of explosive upthrust of that which is ordinarily kept down, under control, is Balzac’s delight and his passion. He asks to be read in the spirit of adventure and daring.” – From Peter Brooks’s Introduction to this Honoré de Balzac collection of stories

Nine stories from the French master collected here, ranging in length from Facino Cane and A Passion in the Desert, each less than twenty pages, to the much longer Another Study of Womankind, Adieu and Gobseck. Also included is the novella, The Duchesse de Langeais. As a way of sharing a literary slice of Balzac's exuberant storytelling pie, I'll focus on a lesser known piece I found particularly dazzling: The Red Inn.

As Peter Brooks points out, Balzac was taken by the art and power of the oral storytelling tradition and how much of the great author’s shorter fiction zeroes in on the dynamics of storytelling, how one character’s relaying a story to listeners can have such explosive consequences. And The Red Inn serves as a prime example: we encounter a tale all about stories and storytelling; matter of fact, like those nesting Russian wooden stacking dolls, this story contains an embedded story and this embedded story leads to other equally dramatic embedded stories. All told, an entire string of stories that fire off like a series of dynamite sticks. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

It all begins with the narrator attending a merry dinner party hosted by a Paris banker where, following ample food and drink, one of the gentlemen in attendance, Hermann by name, a beefy robust blonde German businessman, is requested to tell a story. And Hermann is “like most Germans authors write about” – Ah! At every turn Balzac can’t resist the interplay of life mirroring fiction and fiction mirroring life.

Anyway, everyone settles in to listen to Hermann’s story; meanwhile the narrator takes notice of one of the guests sitting directly across the table, a plump, rather ordinary looking man whose face has suddenly turned ashen, even cadaver-like. In a whisper, he notes this transformation to the attractive young lady sitting next to him. She, in turn, tells him, in brief, the story of this man’s life, how he became a real estate millionaire and has a beautiful daughter he initially repudiated but took back into his household after his beloved son lost his life in a duel.

Our unnamed narrator turns his attention back to Hermann, who at the moment is filling his nose with snuff before launching into his tale. At this juncture the narrator explains what we are reading from this point forward is his translation and artful adaptation of Hermann’s story – he even gives the tale a title: THE IDEA AND THE FACT.

Oh, my, the metafictional plot thickens; such a curious twist for several reasons: 1) the rendering of Hermann’s tale is punctuated with various audience responses, especially the nonverbal reactions of that plump, cadaverous millionaire, Monsieur Taillefer; 2) in all probability, Monsieur Taillefer is a main character in Hermann’s tale; 3) toward the end of The Red Inn, via his relationship with Taillefer's beautiful daughter, the narrator discovers he himself participates indirectly in the ongoing story of the real estate millionaire. Sound complex? Relationships within the various stories mix together but in his role as master storyteller, Honoré de Balzac does a superlative job in clarifying all the intertwining fictional threads so a reader will not get lost.

And here is the set up for Hermann’s tale in broad outline: two twenty-year-old assistant surgeons serving in the French army take their evening logging at an inn across the border in Germany, an inn painted red and called “The Red Inn.” The innkeeper gives the two young gentlemen, Prosper and his mate, Hermann can’t immediately recall his name, his last room. But then another latecomer arrives, a German factory owner by the name of Walhenfer also in need of a room. The surgeons are more than happy to share their room with him. Before all three head off to bed, having together emptied a fair number of bottles of wine, Walhenfer makes the mistake of letting it be known he is carrying a small fortune of gold and diamonds in his valise. The following morning Prosper is aroused from his sleep and surrounded by French soldiers who promptly carry him off to prison – for the factory owner has been murdered, his throat sliced by a surgical instrument, and all his gold and diamonds have vanished.

Reading Balzac’s tale, I was pulled in every bit as much as the dinner guests at the Paris banker’s party - I planned to read The Red Inn over the course of several days but once I started I couldn’t stop. Such is the magic of storytelling. And as this story develops readers are compelled to join the narrator in confronting a number of moral questions: What responsibilities does he have if he knows someone is a criminal or if he knows wealth has been gained by criminal means? Should he report any knowledge he has to the authorities, even if this means others, even those close to him, will be adversely affected? And what exactly should he do if he inherits such a fortune?

Again, The Red Inn is but one of nine classic tales included in this New York Review Books (NYRB) edition. Also, not to be missed, is the astute, scholarly introductory essay on Balzac's short fiction by Peter Brooks.


By my eye, this detail from a Richard Dadd painting captures the spirit of storytelling magic. And, as this collection makes abundantly clear, Honoré de Balzac was a supreme storytelling magician. ( )

Among the many titles that compose The Human Comedy are some short works. This collection brings together nine of those works and their quality does not suffer from their limited length. They are imaginative tales with secrets and suspense and more in store for the willing reader. ( )

“To open up what society and the novel of manners repress, to stage a kind of explosive upthrust of that which is ordinarily kept down, under control, is Balzac’s delight and his passion. He asks to be read in the spirit of adventure and daring.” – From Peter Brooks’s Introduction to this Honoré de Balzac collection of stories

Nine stories from the French master collected here, ranging in length from Facino Cane and A Passion in the Desert, each less than twenty pages, to the much longer Another Study of Womankind, Adieu and Gobseck. Also included is the novella, The Duchesse de Langeais. As a way of sharing a literary slice of Balzac's exuberant storytelling pie, I'll focus on a lesser known piece I found particularly dazzling: The Red Inn.

As Peter Brooks points out, Balzac was taken by the art and power of the oral storytelling tradition and how much of the great author’s shorter fiction zeroes in on the dynamics of storytelling, how one character’s relaying a story to listeners can have such explosive consequences. And The Red Inn serves as a prime example: we encounter a tale all about stories and storytelling; matter of fact, like those nesting Russian wooden stacking dolls, this story contains an embedded story and this embedded story leads to other equally dramatic embedded stories. All told, an entire string of stories that fire off like a series of dynamite sticks. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

It all begins with the narrator attending a merry dinner party hosted by a Paris banker where, following ample food and drink, one of the gentlemen in attendance, Hermann by name, a beefy robust blonde German businessman, is requested to tell a story. And Hermann is “like most Germans authors write about” – Ah! At every turn Balzac can’t resist the interplay of life mirroring fiction and fiction mirroring life.

Anyway, everyone settles in to listen to Hermann’s story; meanwhile the narrator takes notice of one of the guests sitting directly across the table, a plump, rather ordinary looking man whose face has suddenly turned ashen, even cadaver-like. In a whisper, he notes this transformation to the attractive young lady sitting next to him. She, in turn, tells him, in brief, the story of this man’s life, how he became a real estate millionaire and has a beautiful daughter he initially repudiated but took back into his household after his beloved son lost his life in a duel.

Our unnamed narrator turns his attention back to Hermann, who at the moment is filling his nose with snuff before launching into his tale. At this juncture the narrator explains what we are reading from this point forward is his translation and artful adaptation of Hermann’s story – he even gives the tale a title: THE IDEA AND THE FACT.

Oh, my, the metafictional plot thickens; such a curious twist for several reasons: 1) the rendering of Hermann’s tale is punctuated with various audience responses, especially the nonverbal reactions of that plump, cadaverous millionaire, Monsieur Taillefer; 2) in all probability, Monsieur Taillefer is a main character in Hermann’s tale 3) toward the end of The Red Inn, via his relationship with Taillefer's beautiful daughter, the narrator discovers he himself participates indirectly in the ongoing story of the real estate millionaire. Sound complex? Relationships within the various stories mix together but in his role as master storyteller, Honoré de Balzac does a superlative job in clarifying all the intertwining fictional threads so a reader will not get lost.

And here is the set up for Hermann’s tale in broad outline: two twenty-year-old assistant surgeons serving in the French army take their evening logging at an inn across the border in Germany, an inn painted red and called “The Red Inn.” The innkeeper gives the two young gentlemen, Prosper and his mate, Hermann can’t immediately recall his name, his last room. But then another latecomer arrives, a German factory owner by the name of Walhenfer also in need of a room. The surgeons are more than happy to share their room with him. Before all three head off to bed, having together emptied a fair number of bottles of wine, Walhenfer makes the mistake of letting it be known he is carrying a small fortune of gold and diamonds in his valise. The following morning Prosper is aroused from his sleep and surrounded by French soldiers who promptly carry him off to prison – for the factory owner has been murdered, his throat sliced by a surgical instrument, and all his gold and diamonds have vanished.

Reading Balzac’s tale, I was pulled in every bit as much as the dinner guests at the Paris banker’s party - I planned to read The Red Inn over the course of several days but once I started I couldn’t stop. Such is the magic of storytelling. And as this story develops readers are compelled to join the narrator in confronting a number of moral questions: What responsibilities does he have if he knows someone is a criminal or if he knows wealth has been gained by criminal means? Should he report any knowledge he has to the authorities, even if this means others, even those close to him, will be adversely affected? And what exactly should he do if he inherits such a fortune?

Again, The Red Inn is but one of nine classic tales included in this New York Review Books (NYRB) edition. Also, not to be missed, is the astute, scholarly introductory essay on Balzac's short fiction by Peter Brooks. ( )

Balzac is known for his prolific writing and long novels, so I found it interesting to read this collection of stories and one novella. Most of them involve someone telling a story to someone else, and indeed sometimes more than one person telling more than one story, so it seems that part of what Balzac is doing is illustrating the nature of story-telling. Many of the stories focus on love and desire, often thwarted, sometimes illicit, sometimes veering on madness, sometimes very strange, as in the story about a man who befriends a panther in the North African desert. Many probably involve characters who appear in other volumes of The Human Comedy but since I haven't read that much Balzac I only recognized some of the characters from Père Goriot.

The stories that made the greatest impression on me were "The Red Inn," about murder, greed, and guilt; Sarrasine, about a man who discovers that the woman he is obsessed with is a castrated man; "A Passion in the Desert," about the man and the panther; "Adieu," about a woman who goes crazy because of an experience on a battlefield (although it was never clear to me why she was there in the first place) and the man who loves and tries to heal her; and "Gosbeck," which is largely about money and its role in love and marriage (and hatred, jealousy and betrayal). The novella, "The Duchesse de Langeais," was horrifying, compelling, and dramatic in parts, but suffered from an overly long (for me) digression on the nature of the people living in the Faubourg Saint Germain.

As with the other new release by NYRB I read recently, this book has notes at the end that are referenced only by page number; I find this irritating because I don't look up some things that I would be interested in knowing about and do look up some things that don't have notes. I find numbered endnotes much more helpful because then I know what to look up.