Balzac: Reading for More

Abstract How I moved from more “classical” works, of music and literature, to Balzac: why Balzac came to matter, and how reading individual works of his Human Comedy leads the reader to want more, to move on to further reading. The technique of “returning characters” that Balzac discovered while writing Père Goriot leads us from one notlve to another, and gives the fictional persons who reappear from novel to novel a new weight from the stories they carry with them. Main example in this chapter is Eugène de Rastignac, one of the best known and most important characers in the Human Comedy.