Father Goriot
Balzac lived in the first half of the nineteenth century and thus depicts the society of Louis-Philippe. The novel recounts the story of a man who, out of love for his daughters, leads a wretched and despised life. His paternal devotion stands in stark contrast to a society dominated by money, appearances, and climbing the social ladder at all costs. The approach is moralistic, the style tedious and ponderous, the French difficult: in short, a "bad" novel, which I could not bring myself to finish. When one compares Balzac (at least the Balzac of this book) with Stendhal, the disparity in quality is striking: where Stendhal is nimble yet profound in his characterizations (figures rich in contradictions), Balzac appears rigid, didactic, and predictable. In Stendhal there are "heroes"; in Balzac, opaque figures already condemned to an existence trapped within the constraints of money and social ambition. Perhaps Balzac’s society is truer to life, but it is undeniably duller. To say nothing of the French. In Stendhal it flows, and it is the very structure and rhythm of the sentence that endow the narrative with meaning (with no need for an excess of adjectives); in Balzac, an elaborate vocabulary is required merely to give expression to the tale.
Gate of Heavenly Peace
The novel opens with the events of Tiananmen Square and the flight of one of the revolt’s instigators (the protagonist, Ayamei): the young woman takes refuge with a fishing family in an isolated area, where she is hunted by the Chinese army under the command of a young officer, Zhao. To evade capture, Ayamei flees into the woods and immerses herself in a new life, in close contact with nature, and “in the mountains she breathes only for the light, the wind, and the forest.” The novel concludes mysteriously: Ayamei climbs to the highest peak of the mountains, and Zhao, having deduced where she is hiding, looks through his binoculars toward the mountain and sees the figure of a woman who falls into the void, gazes at him, and > eyes locked in eyes, he forgot all of his past life. The gaze was dark, intense. The lips red . The Tiananmen Square uprising is merely an occasion to unfold a narrative that is a blend of romanticism, an awakening to the limits and hypocrisies of a rule-bound society, and, ultimately, a “magical” tale characteristic of the Chinese world. Ayamei’s love for Min, a rebellious and nonconformist schoolmate, is the classic Western story of a relationship thwarted by society and parents, culminating in the young man’s suicide, precisely as the predictable plot of love stories in our own literature dictates. The burgeoning awareness of Ayamei and Zhao traces a distinct yet parallel path, leading them to grasp the vacuity and cruelty of a society that assigns each individual a role and a responsibility within the overarching dominance of collective demands over personal ones. Finally, there is the more distinctly Chinese theme: the rediscovery of nature and its mythological and magical dimensions, losing oneself in a pre-rational realm where the values of beauty and balance are ends in themselves rather than instruments. As the protagonist asks, > is it possible to forget that all beauty is ephemeral, is it possible to live the unreal? or Zhao’s questioning whether it is right to kill the eagle, which > magnificent, perches upon a rock. Its muscles are hard as steel: its eyes gleam like the sharp blade of a dagger; its black plumage resembles a suit of armor . The answer can only be affirmative in a society where everyone is assigned a function, and thus the hunter’s is to kill the prey (“it is our trade, hunters have no mercy”). This medley of inspirations proves to be the novel’s limitation: it fails to strike a narrative equilibrium, suffering from numerous lapses in pacing and thematic development (take, for instance, the excerpts from Ayamei’s diary, often tedious and predictable). The style suffers as well: a very effective opening (short, sparse sentences) gradually gives way to an increasingly lyrical tone, which—while enhancing the perception of an encroaching unreality—nonetheless strips the prose of that dry, taut quality which constitutes one of the novel’s greatest strengths.