Vanson Curse Book

One of those crappy walter black editions from the 1920s that has tons of typos, smudged letters and stuck together pages, so probably doesnt correspond with the edition catalogged here. it also has incredibly dense text layout, almost completely lack of footnotes, and no commentary. the rating thus applies to the actual texts rather than the edition, of which im not even sure what translations they are. what we have here is fourteen novellas and one short story from la comedie humaine - eight taken from scenes from private life, four from parisian life, and the other three from various other places. despite the lack of footnotes and commentary the stories flow really well with one another - the opening scathing monologue of the girl with the golden eyes sets the tone quite nicely. no real duds in here although the firm of nucigen and the unconscious mummers were a little dense and certainly the kind of thing that a re-read or two would benefit. highlights are the intense melodrama of the vendetta, and the somewhat ironic tragedies of the commission in lunacy and colonel chabert. probably the most tragic story is a passion in the desert as its a lot easier to feel bad for the innocence of animals compared to scheming parisians. i'd only read old goriot going into this and that was like 10 years ago, but a lot of the characters from that make their way into these stories, and its pretty neat to see major characters in some works being minor characters in others or even mentioned in an off-hand comment in others still. i'd really like to track down a complete edition of the comedy, but it certainly looks like it would be a formidable task