A Harlot High and Low (The Human Comedy)

Easily in the top 5 books I've ever read. Highly recommend! I've read a few other Balzac novels before this one but order doesn't really matter. Ideally, I'd recommend reading Pere Goriot and Lost Illusions before this masterpiece. Great translation as well.

Looking forward to read it.

The cover will tell you this is a love story about an ex-prostitute and an ambitious poet in Paris, but it's really about the career of a villainous genius. Lucien, the social-climbing hero of Balzac's "Lost Illusions" is back, now with a new gorgeous mistress and a mysterious mentor, the Spanish priest Carlos Herrera. What begins as a "La Boheme" style romance turns into a cat-and-mouse game between spies, police inspectors, and master criminals. Balzac knows the ins and outs of Parisian high society and the underworld, and has some choice things to say about both. Most of it is tremendous fun, but there are moments of horrible tragedy, one of which was so vile it spoiled my enjoyment to a certain extent. It helps if the reader has read "Pere Goriot" and "Lost Illusions" first, but the three books are completely different in tone. Knowing about Lucien, Herrera, and several other characters from the earlier two novels gives this depth, and makes Lucien more sympathetic than he is with "A Harlot High and Low" as your introduction to the character.

This novel tells a dark story about life in Paris during the 19th century. It is excellent, but not for those who require a happy ending.

Balzac at his most scathing: genius

A sequel to one of Balzac's masterpieces, Lost Illusions, this book unfortunately is unworthy of its role. Although it starts off well, with an exciting pick-up from the events of the predecessor tale in just the first chapter, it meanders for the next 200 pages before things finally start to happen about midway through this book of 553 pages! It also barely accounts for the activities of seven years of Lucien Chardon/Lucien de Rubempré, who occupied nearly every page of Lost Illusions!! Fortunately, it redeems itself in the final act, which follows the activities of Jacques Collin, one of the great characters of literature, describing his genius turnaround of fortune. Initially disappointing, yet somehow satisfying in the end, it still left me wanting more. Bravo!

The artists journey was an excellent topic for a book and an easy excuse for a sequel. Balzac turns on his scathing depiction scope on all of society leaving no class unbothered even the most sacred class of them all--the ARTIST class. This last of a two series is unsuspectingly the most effigial of Balzac for the Human Comedy. The artist was the catharsis. Some of the more titilating and manic moments of the novel have to be taken with a grain of salt. Yes, he was one of the fathers of the modern novel but he also had to move units. If you can sway past the soap opera moments and laugh past the startlingly believable pieces of human stupidity then you will enjoy Balzac. If not, go read Guy de Maupassant for Darwin's sake.

This novel has the faults of Balzac: for example, an at times overbearing narrator, a willingness to pause the narrative and provide encyclopedia entries on such matters as the slang of criminals or the structure of the French courts. But it has the endlessly fascinating hero/villain Vautrin (aka Collin, aka Carlos Herrera), who survives and dominates the world he encounters. Lucien Chardon and Esther are interesting and at times moving, but they pale before their supreme puppet master. I picked up this book to find out what would happen to the characters Balzac presented in Illusions perdues, and I wasn't disappointed. That said, I read this book on Kindle and found the text full of annoying typographical errors. Does anyone proofread the text after it's prepped for Kindle? Someone should.

GREAT

I'm a big fan of Balzac and so it is enormously disappointing that this book is such a Grade A Turkey. Balzac's literary object was to describe the Human Comedy of scenes from French Parisian and provincial life. In this volume his subject is the criminal underworld and he uses the master criminal Jacques Collins, who has first appeared in Balzac's Old Goriot as the central character. Collin is as cunning and deceitful a person as you will ever come across. Here Collin uses Lucien de Rubempres - previously the handsome poet hero of Balzac's Lost Illusions, together with Esther Gobeseck - the original harlot with a heart of gold - as tools for his evil plans. Unfortunately this mix is a disaster in plot terms and it is totally unclear as to whether the narrative is following Collin, Lucien or Esther and since each of their stories has a different arc the whole is a complete failure. There are passages and paragraphs in the narrative which presage Proust in their nobility, but these are few and far between and fairly soon Balzac loses himself in the most fantastically complex plot wherein the poet Lucien is to marry an heiress provided he can prove he is a man of financial substance. The means of providing that proof becomes the sale of Esther by Collin to the fabulously wealthy Baron Nucingen. But this scheme unravels because Esther truly loves Lucien and decides that rather than submit to being Nucingen's mistress she will commit suicide. This brings the force of the law down on both Collin and Lucien and in the final scenes Collin comes into his own in attempting to escape from the clutches of the law. There's nothing wrong with Balzac's idea but his execution is hopeless. Collin is a pale shadow of a character until the final few chapters and so the narrative is dominated by the love story between Lucien and Esther. Unfortunately the power of their love makes the willingness of this couple to submit to Collin's plans for them totally implausible since they cannot both be completely in love and have worldly ambitions. This implausibility is made worse by the fact that Lucien is known to the reader through Balzac's Lost Illusions and, although in that book he was also a weak character and prepared to do bad things, he would never knowingly allow a woman such as Esther to prostitute herself for his financial gain. This implausibility knocks the bottom out of Balzac's world. Balzac's cast is enormous and there are so many characters in this book that I began to lose the plot altogether. In addition many if not all of the characters have more than one name (Collin has five or six) so that the reader is frequently left bewildered as to who is who and what they're motives are. When the police start to close in instead of one master policeman there are two named Coretin and Contenson and the judge is called Camuset - it's very hard to follow. Finally Baron Nucingen is a Polish Jew and Balzac has written the part in cod dialogue that is extremely hard work - at least in translation. I'd like to say that there is a good book trying to get out from these pages but in truth I think the entire narrative is misguided, poorly plotted, with dubious characterization and with only the occasional piece of purple prose to redeem it. My conclusion is that this is one to avoid.