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    Droll Stories: Selected Tales
    Unavailable
    Droll Stories: Selected Tales
    Unavailable
    Droll Stories: Selected Tales
    Ebook250 pages4 hours

    Droll Stories: Selected Tales

    By Honoré de Balzac

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    These choice selections from Honoré de Balzac's Droll Stories offer a lively and lusty portrait of sixteenth-century French life and manners. Told in the tradition of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Rabelais, they allegedly originated in manuscripts from the abbeys of Touraine. Originally published in three sets of ten tales in the 1830s, the stories abound in episodes of good-humored licentiousness that scandalized Balzac's contemporaries and continue to delight modern readers.
    French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a founder of realism in European literature. An inspiration to Proust, Dickens, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, and countless others, Balzac wrote works that were hailed for their multifaceted characters and exquisite attention to detail. This edition's excellent translation was the first to make his Contes Drolatiques available to English-speaking readers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateJan 16, 2019
    ISBN9780486836843
    Unavailable
    Droll Stories: Selected Tales
    Author

    Honoré de Balzac

    Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Regarded as one of the key figures of French and European literature, Balzac’s realist approach to writing would influence Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and Karl Marx. With a precocious attitude and fierce intellect, Balzac struggled first in school and then in business before dedicating himself to the pursuit of writing as both an art and a profession. His distinctly industrious work routine—he spent hours each day writing furiously by hand and made extensive edits during the publication process—led to a prodigious output of dozens of novels, stories, plays, and novellas. La Comédie humaine, Balzac’s most famous work, is a sequence of 91 finished and 46 unfinished stories, novels, and essays with which he attempted to realistically and exhaustively portray every aspect of French society during the early-nineteenth century.

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    • 4/5
      A set of light, fun short stories about love. Done in an imitation of Rabelais' style. Intricate wordplay and innuendo about love. A lot is lost in translation, but some of the simple lewd humor shines through.
    • 4/5
      These are some stories translated from Old French to English about life in Tourraine, France, in the 16th century... mostly as it related to scandals involving sex, elopements, drama in royal/noble families, drama @ French & English court, and/or adultery. Pretty shocking what Honoré de Balzac actually comes out and says, cloaking the scandalous parts of stories with amusing metaphors that are only too easy to guess. Here's a passage out of his short story "The Reproach," just to give you a taste:"The sweet wench and her well-beloved were busy trying to catch, in a certain lake that you probably know, the little bird that never stays in it, and they were laughing and trying, and still laughing" (183).The translation sometimes makes it difficult to understand the more subtle references, unfortunately. I'm sure it would be doubly hilarious in its original French. Still, I'm pleased that this text was translated at all. It certainly does give one a good idea of what people were like back then, 5-600 years ago. According to the translator's intro, they all appreciated a good, crude joke. If you can, too, then you'll enjoy Balzac's Droll Stories.