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Paul Bryant's Reviews > Cousin Bette
Cousin Bette
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The blurb says that the nasty old spinster Cousin Bette goes on a mission to destroy her supercilious condescending family, so I though well, that sounds fun!
It also says “Cousin Bette is a book in which Balzac is most characteristically and triumphantly himself”. That turned out to be not so much fun because Balzac is an insufferable know it all who obsesses about a) people’s income; b) married men spending fortunes on their various mistresses, some of whom are more than somewhat young looking; and c) the quality of interior furnishing.
Well you might say this applies to most authors – they are knowitalls about the world they’re writing about, and they do love to describe rooms and furniture, especially in the olden days because due to a lack of tv nobody knew what anything looked like.
When I checked my review of the only other Balzac I read – Old Goriot – I see it began very badly and tediously and then warmed up and I liked it in the end. But after dozens and dozens of pages of Cousin Bette he was still describing jewelery and mistresses and how if you could flash enough cash you could get yourself any pretty woman you cared to in France in the 1830s. Yourself being a man, of course.
So this is going to be all about hypocrisy and double standards and the awfulness of the rich and the even more awfulness of the many people trying to become rich or trying to pretend they’re still rich. I kind of ran out of patience before the plot got going. This book got to feel like medicine for an ailment I didn't have.
I hope Cousin Bette and her monobrow utterly wrecked this ghastly family and she shouldn’t have stopped there either. She should have formed a group of ninja guerrilla spinsters who could bring down all these lofty misstresstaking grandees with well-aimed poison darts. But I will never know.
As Elvis said
A little less conversation, a little more action, please
All this aggravation ain't satisfactioning me
It also says “Cousin Bette is a book in which Balzac is most characteristically and triumphantly himself”. That turned out to be not so much fun because Balzac is an insufferable know it all who obsesses about a) people’s income; b) married men spending fortunes on their various mistresses, some of whom are more than somewhat young looking; and c) the quality of interior furnishing.
Well you might say this applies to most authors – they are knowitalls about the world they’re writing about, and they do love to describe rooms and furniture, especially in the olden days because due to a lack of tv nobody knew what anything looked like.
When I checked my review of the only other Balzac I read – Old Goriot – I see it began very badly and tediously and then warmed up and I liked it in the end. But after dozens and dozens of pages of Cousin Bette he was still describing jewelery and mistresses and how if you could flash enough cash you could get yourself any pretty woman you cared to in France in the 1830s. Yourself being a man, of course.
So this is going to be all about hypocrisy and double standards and the awfulness of the rich and the even more awfulness of the many people trying to become rich or trying to pretend they’re still rich. I kind of ran out of patience before the plot got going. This book got to feel like medicine for an ailment I didn't have.
I hope Cousin Bette and her monobrow utterly wrecked this ghastly family and she shouldn’t have stopped there either. She should have formed a group of ninja guerrilla spinsters who could bring down all these lofty misstresstaking grandees with well-aimed poison darts. But I will never know.
As Elvis said
A little less conversation, a little more action, please
All this aggravation ain't satisfactioning me
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Reading Progress
October 8, 2023
– Shelved as:
to-read-novels
October 8, 2023
– Shelved
April 29, 2024
–
Started Reading
May 13, 2024
– Shelved as:
abandoned
May 13, 2024
– Shelved as:
novels
May 13, 2024
–
Finished Reading
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Junko
(new)
May 13, 2024 09:03AM
one day there's gonna be somebody bold enough to admit Balzac has been intentionally overrarated and that, more painfully, he gave birth to a boring branch of literature which still spreads its boredom in most of the bookshops. a boring, productive talent, whose boring-doing nowadays would be as successful as the boring talent of Taylor Swift.
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Balzac is totally a boring moralist with a very narrow understanding of human behavior. To me the meaning of a classic is a book that continues to speak to the human experience even outside of the culture from which it was written and to me he spectacularly fails to do that. He just writes a lot of tropes of his own culture.Source: I read Eugenie Grandet.
