Reviews for Honore de Balzac

The average rating for Honore de Balzac based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-07-21 00:00:00 Jonathan Brawner In-love-in-anguish you really feel that (had you known) you could never had never loved the being you-love-forever, all along you feel love threatening you, but you don't know it. The more you feel, the more instinctively you ward it off by increasing the love therefore the anguish. It would be unwise to call it a health scare. My experience earlier this week was nevertheless a novel one. I awoke in the night and my body didn't feel right. My imagination soon colored between the lines. I read nearly all of this at the doctor's office. Physically I think I'm fine. I'm glad I had Cixous to lean on there. This masterful work concerns Cixous' time in the States in 1964-65. Her journey appears in the refracted lens of memory to be from library to library. She met someone at the Beinecke at Yale, the bond was one of letters, one of possibility. Her faded thoughts collect and gather, the mold of time and other loss leads to further association and puns. The floating theme appears to be Loss. It is a bold editorial decision, there are no footnotes, so the reader is free to race and revel. I am glad I did.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-12-11 00:00:00 Tim Harpster I found this in a used bookstore in Northampton, MA (Raven Used Books) for $7.50, and I am glad I did, because it seems to be quite rare. This is my first Cixous, though I have been curious about her for some time. I know that she coined the term "ecriture feminin" and I can see how Manhattan could be an example of that. The prose is many things that are considered "feminine" in writing: stream-of consciousness, recollection in reverie, and non-linearity. It felt similar to reading Anais Nin (Diaries) or some Virginia Woolf (The Waves). Cixous looks back in time at one of the events which formed her personal mythology and wonders why. She looks back at other events in time, but mostly as they bracketed this one experience, meeting a man who turns out to be a sheep in wolves' clothing. Cixous is trying to figure out - I think - which version of the man she loved and why. Why him? Why then? Like other good stream-of-consciousness/reverie writing, you do not need to worry about reading every word; just float along with the language until it interrupts you with beauty. That was my approach to reading this, as one dips in and out of a calm sea. That the sea is calm is a feature of age and its ability to analyze and forgive both self and other.