In Translation

Balzac’s Novel of Female Friendship

Balzac’s The Memoirs of Two Young Wives is as much a dialectical as an epistolary novel, built on the contrasts and binaries embodied in the two women’s unfolding lives, for all their nourishing friendship.

January 9, 2018

A Hungry Little Boy

“Pears had a special appeal for Balzac; he often kept bushels of them at home and could eat as many as forty or fifty in a day (one February he had 1,500 pears in his cellar).”

January 12, 2012 issue

Balzac’s Genius & Other Paradoxes

“Balzac’s claim to the title of Greatest French Novelist of All Time can hardly be disputed…. The total cast of his Comédie humaine amounts to some 3,500 characters (including a few animals)—in all of Western literature, only Shakespeare and Dickens approached such a bewildering fecundity.”

January 12, 1995 issue

Balzac Possessed

“From then on the pattern was set: an immense and increasing load of debt arising from extravagance and speculation—Balzac only had to touch a stock for the bottom to drop out of the market—against which were mortgaged the plans and profits of novel after novel. He turned his hopes and disasters into fiction as he lived through them.”

October 4, 1973 issue

Proust’s Way?

“When it comes to a master stylist like Proust, a translator’s aim should be to capture both the luster of Proust’s insights and the stylistic pitch of his sentences.” 

December 1, 2005 issue

Proustifications

“To practice writing love letters, as Balzac said, improves a writer’s style. But Proust’s turn out also to be a store of fragments that will find their way, years ahead, in A la recherche.”

July 21, 1983 issue

Proust the Passionate Reader

“Only a few people belong to the secret order of sincere and insightful readers whom Proust respects, and among whom there exists a powerful complicity.”

April 4, 2013 issue

Proust’s Jewish Question

The debate over Proust’s relation to his Jewish identity ultimately turns not just on his personal attachments but on how he represents Jewish characters in his novel.

June 26, 2025 issue