Le Père Goriot =
Subtitle: Old Goriot
By: Honoré de Balzac ; translated from the French by Burton Raffel.
Contributors: Raffel, Burton.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: W.W. Norton
Published: 1994
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 325
Subjects: Fathers and daughters -- Fiction; Older men -- Fiction; France -- History -- Louis XVIII, 1814-1824 -- Fiction; Paris (France) -- Fiction
Genres: Fiction.
Description: In a grimy boardinghouse in a dismal Parisian neighborhood, Balzac sets the stage for his 1834 study of paternal love, of greed, envy, and despair. Pere Goriot tells the story of a nineteenth-century counterpart to King Lear, a father so blindly devoted to his undeserving daughters that his tragic realization - "I loved them too much for them to love me at all" - comes too late.

This best-known of Balzac's Comedie humaine novels has all the stylistic elements one might expect: unnerving psychological analyses; vivid physical descriptions, acute observations of the rules governing Parisian society, disarming wit, and unbridled passion. Burton Raffel's translation is responsive to Balzac's style as well as to his words - nothing is suppressed, nothing obfuscated. The result is a highly readable, idiomatic translation of a master storyteller by a master translator.