Name: Bureaucracy
SKU: 61609718
Price: 23.11 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Honoré De Balzac
ISBN: 9781545325032

Type

Physical Book

Author

Honoré De Balzac

Translated by

Katharine Prescott Wormeley

Publisher

Createspace

Language

English

Pages

208

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

22.9x15.2x1.1 cm

Weight

0.29 kg.

ISBN13

9781545325032

Synopsis "Bureaucracy"

A strange creation. Part study, part Platonic dialogue, part novel, it all adds up to a fascinating literary artifact. Bureaucracy is Balzac's study of the French bureaucracy under the reign of Charles X in the 1920s. It is a kaleidoscope of characters, bureaucratic positions, and machinations. The division director dies and needs to be replaced. Two bureau chiefs are jockeying for the position. The Minister has to make the decision, but mostly delegates it to his fixer, the Secretary-General, who himself is mostly focused on sleeping with one of the bureau chief's wives, getting out of debt, and becoming a Deputy. A large cast of bureaucratic underlings play an important role in the adroit and impressive machinations of the two camps. Ultimately, the good bureau chief loses out and the one who it would be overly generous to describe as a mediocrity ascends one rung up the ladder to become Division Director.

Honoré De Balzac

(Author)

View Author's Page

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1851), novelist, playwright, literary and art critic, essayist, journalist, and French printer, is considered one of the great writers of realism. Born in Tours, in 1814 he moved to Paris, where he studied law and began working in a law firm, but his love for literature drove him to abandon his career and dedicate himself to writing. He undertook several businesses, which ended in failure and left him in debt. With The Last Chouan (1829), he achieved great success. From then on, he began a feverish activity, writing, among others, The Physiology of Marriage (1829) and The Wild Ass's Skin (1831), with which he began to consolidate his prestige. In 1834, Balzac, a tireless worker, conceived the idea of making an exhaustive portrait of French society of his time by having the same characters appear in different stories, which began to give his work a unitary sense under the title of The Human Comedy, to which belong titles such as Eugénie Grandet (1833), Father Goriot (1835), Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans (1838-1847) or Cousin Bette (1846), although of the 137 novels that were to make it up, fifty remained incomplete. An extraordinary writer, capable of deploying in his works sublime reflections and ideas, creating an interesting story with strong social criticism through exquisite prose of great poetic level and philosophical depth, Balzac is considered the founder of the modern novel.

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