Girl with the Golden Eyes

Girl with the Golden Eyes

by Honore de Balzac

Narrated by LibriVox Community

 — 4 hours, 30 minutes

Girl with the Golden Eyes

Girl with the Golden Eyes

by Honore de Balzac

Narrated by LibriVox Community

 — 4 hours, 30 minutes

Audiobook (Digital)

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Overview


Listeners who like to plunge straight into a story would do well to skip the lengthy preamble. Here, Balzac the virtuoso satirist depicts the levels of Parisian society as a version of the Inferno of Dante - but perhaps keeps the reader waiting too long for the first act of his operatic extravaganza.

Our beautiful, androgynous hero, Henri de Marsay, is one of the bastard offspring of a depraved Regency milord and himself practises the cynical arts of the libertine. His quarry is the exotic Paquita Valdes, she of the golden eyes.

But there is a mysterious third person in this liaison...

The shocking truth of their interrelationships marks this out at once as one of those French novels that Lady Bracknell would instantly ban from the house. (Summary by Martin Geeson)


Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

Part of his "History of the Thirteen" trilogy, Balzac's novella deals with the dark side of love as protagonist Henri de Marsay's attempts to seduce an innocent girl lead to jealousy and revenge. This volume is suitable for academic collections supporting French literature curricula.

From the Publisher

"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read."
—Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer

"Small wonders."
Time Out London

"[F]irst-rate…astutely selected and attractively packaged…indisputably great works."
—Adam Begley, The New York Observer

"I’ve always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But it’s the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publisher’s fine 'Art of the Novella' series."
The New Yorker

"The Art of the Novella series is sort of an anti-Kindle. What these singular, distinctive titles celebrate is book-ness. They're slim enough to be portable but showy enough to be conspicuously consumed—tiny little objects that demand to be loved for the commodities they are."
—KQED (NPR San Francisco)

"Some like it short, and if you're one of them, Melville House, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, has a line of books for you... elegant-looking paperback editions ...a good read in a small package."
The Wall Street Journal

Product Details

BN ID: 2940170337057
Publisher: LibriVox
Publication date: 08/25/2014
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