DAVID BARRIE
Thursday, 7th October 2010. On recurrent characters.
With all the zeal of a recent convert, I’m a big Balzac fan. I hadn’t read any of his work until about five years ago (I simply assumed he was the French nineteenth century’s answer to Dickens, and since I’ve always avoided Dickens – perhaps mistakenly so – I did the same to him), but since then I’ve been ploughing steadily through his oeuvre (which, given its bulk, is no guarantee I’ll ever make it to the end).
Part of my admiration is due to his industry. Writers who pound out vast quantities of prose at great speed are often held in suspicion, if not derision, but I stand amazed before them. As a teen, I was an avid follower of Michael Moorcock, the great British fantasy/scifi writer, who seemed to stack books up the way a lumberjack felled trees. Nowadays, I regularly pop into La Maison de Balzac in the sixteenth arrondissement and pay homage to the tiny table on which he knocked out page after page after page. Who could refuse to admire a writer who has so many tales to tell?
Another thing I delight in with Balzac is the way he deploys a cast of characters who come and go through his innumerable works. Every now and then a name will pop up that you recognise from a previous book, and it’s a very clever trick to make you feel that you’re a connoisseur of the society he’s describing (aside from the symbolic value with which an ever-present Rastignac, Vautrin or Nucingen becomes charged). So if anyone’s wondering why several characters from Wasp-Waisted and Night-Scented return in the third Franck Guerin tale, my limited imagination is only part of the answer ...
With all the zeal of a recent convert, I’m a big Balzac fan. I hadn’t read any of his work until about five years ago (I simply assumed he was the French nineteenth century’s answer to Dickens, and since I’ve always avoided Dickens – perhaps mistakenly so – I did the same to him), but since then I’ve been ploughing steadily through his oeuvre (which, given its bulk, is no guarantee I’ll ever make it to the end).
Part of my admiration is due to his industry. Writers who pound out vast quantities of prose at great speed are often held in suspicion, if not derision, but I stand amazed before them. As a teen, I was an avid follower of Michael Moorcock, the great British fantasy/scifi writer, who seemed to stack books up the way a lumberjack felled trees. Nowadays, I regularly pop into La Maison de Balzac in the sixteenth arrondissement and pay homage to the tiny table on which he knocked out page after page after page. Who could refuse to admire a writer who has so many tales to tell?
Another thing I delight in with Balzac is the way he deploys a cast of characters who come and go through his innumerable works. Every now and then a name will pop up that you recognise from a previous book, and it’s a very clever trick to make you feel that you’re a connoisseur of the society he’s describing (aside from the symbolic value with which an ever-present Rastignac, Vautrin or Nucingen becomes charged). So if anyone’s wondering why several characters from Wasp-Waisted and Night-Scented return in the third Franck Guerin tale, my limited imagination is only part of the answer ...