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Cousin Bette de Honoré de Balzac

Cousin Bette

Autor Honoré de Balzac Traducere de Marion Ayton Crawford
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 2 dec 2004
A gripping tale of violent jealousy, sexual passion and treachery, Honoré de Balzac's Cousin Bette is translated from the French with an introduction by Marion Ayton Crawford in Penguin Classics.

Poor, plain spinster Bette is compelled to survive on the condescending patronage of her socially superior relatives in Paris: her beautiful, saintly cousin Adeline, the philandering Baron Hulot and their daughter Hortense. Already deeply resentful of their wealth, when Bette learns that the man she is in love with plans to marry Hortense, she becomes consumed by the desire to exact her revenge and dedicates herself to the destruction of the Hulot family, plotting their ruin with patient, silent malice. The culmination of the Comédie humaine, and a brilliant portrayal of the grasping, bourgeois society of 1840s Paris, Cousin Bette is one of Balzac's greatest triumphs as a novelist.

Marion Ayton Crawford's lively translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing the novel's portrayal of rapidly changing times, as the new, ambitious middle classes replaced France's old imperial ways.

Honoré De Balzac (1799-1850) failed at being a lawyer, publisher, printer, businessman, critic and politician before, at the age of thirty, turning his hand to writing. His life's work, La Comédie humaine, is a series of ninety novels and short stories which offer a magnificent panorama of nineteenth-century life after the French Revolution. Balzac was an influence on innumerable writers who followed him, including Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe.

If you enjoyed Cousin Bette, you might like Balzac's Old Goriot, also available in Penguin Classics.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780140441604
ISBN-10: 0140441603
Pagini: 464
Dimensiuni: 128 x 196 x 22 mm
Greutate: 0.32 kg
Ediția:Reprint
Editura: Penguin Books
Locul publicării:London, United Kingdom

Notă biografică

Honore de Balzac was born in Tours in 1799 to a bourgeouis family. His first success with writing came with the publication of Les Chouans in 1829 which was followed by a vast collection of novels and short stories of which Cousin Bette, first published in 1847, is one of the chief novels. He died in 1850 only a few months after his marriage to the Polish countess Evelina Hanska, with whom he had conducted a romantic correspondence for 18 years.


Marion Crawford translated two other titles for Penguin; Old Goriot and Eugenie Grandet before her death in 1973.

Descriere

Descriere de la o altă ediție sau format:

Cousin Bette (1846) is a novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. Part of Balzac's La Comédie humaine sequence, the novel is recognized as being the author's last fully-realized work, and features several characters who appear elsewhere throughout his legendary series. It has inspired several film and television adaptations, as well as earned comparisons to Shakespeare's Othello and Tolstoy's War and Peace. The novel focuses on the life and exploits of Bette Fischer, a 42-year-old woman whose bitterness at remaining unmarried--despite several proposals by men she deemed unworthy--drives her to ruin the reputations and lives of her extended family. After rescuing the young sculptor Wenceslas Steinbock from suicide, Bette develops a complex affection for the man. When he falls in love with Hortense, the daughter of Bette's cousin Adeline, she hatches a plan to gain revenge for this perceived personal slight. She recruits the young and beautiful Valérie Marneffe--an unhappily married woman--to seduce Adeline's husband, Baron Hector Hulot, whose uncontrolled desires and extensive vanity both test his family's loyalty and stretch their finances to the furthest possible limit. Cousin Bette is an intense psychological drama and character study that burns with the fire of Balzac's critique of French society. While exposing the depths of human immorality--particularly where money is made the center of personal relationships--Balzac manages to remind us that what makes us human is not what drives us apart, but the lengths to which we will go to cultivate love despite our basest impulses. To read Cousin Bette is to observe the hopes, flaws, and desires of the people of nineteenth century France, but to ultimately judge ourselves. This final masterpiece of Honoré de Balzac is a testament to the skill and dedication of one of history's finest literary minds. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Honoré de Balzac's Cousin Bette is a classic of French literature reimagined for modern readers.

Recenzii

'Appended to the text is a summary of its financial plots, the complications of which appear even more marvellous when extrapolated in this way. This is an introduction which is consistently enthusiastic about the complexity of a novel which, 'in its rich ambiguity, allows every reader to explore his or how own imagination of what life is really like'.'Robert Lethbridge, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, French Studies, Vol. 47, Part 3
'Three Classic tales of sexual passion, perversion, and corruption have been added to the rapidly increasing World's Classics collection, whose repertoire of nineteenth-century French novels is now impressive. The price and format of these volumes make them an obvious choice for the reader approaching them in translation, the more so since each is accompanied by a helpful general introduction ... the reader is likely to get better vaqlue here than from other translation currently in print.'Timothy Unwin, University of Western Australia, MLR, 89./2, 1994
'... translated here into lucid, straightforward, easily readable contemporary English.'Forum for Modern Language Studies Vol. XXX