1842

3 books

sort genre era audiobooks

Albert Savarus Honoré de Balzac, translated by Ellen Marriage
Minor Balzac, but sneaky good: a jealous young woman in stuffy Besançon reads a lawyer's thinly veiled autobiographical novella and quietly dismantles his whole life from her drawing room. Sit through the provincial genealogy up front and Rosalie's cold patience will genuinely unsettle you.
Dead Souls Nikolai Gogol, translated by C. J. Hogarth
Chichikov rides around buying up dead serfs from provincial landowners, and every one of them (dreamy Manilov, miserly Plyushkin) is funnier and sadder than the last. It's absurd, digressive, and unfinished, which somehow suits it.
Ursule Mirouët Honoré de Balzac, translated by Clara Bell
Balzac in a gentle mood, mostly: an old atheist doctor in a small town raises his orphaned goddaughter while his relatives circle the inheritance like polite vultures. You get his usual sharp eye for greed, plus a strange séance-and-ghosts thread that's odd but weirdly moving.

3 books

sort genre era audiobooks

Albert Savarus Honoré de Balzac, translated by Ellen Marriage
Minor Balzac, but sneaky good: a jealous young woman in stuffy Besançon reads a lawyer's thinly veiled autobiographical novella and quietly dismantles his whole life from her drawing room. Sit through the provincial genealogy up front and Rosalie's cold patience will genuinely unsettle you.
Dead Souls Nikolai Gogol, translated by C. J. Hogarth
Chichikov rides around buying up dead serfs from provincial landowners, and every one of them (dreamy Manilov, miserly Plyushkin) is funnier and sadder than the last. It's absurd, digressive, and unfinished, which somehow suits it.
Ursule Mirouët Honoré de Balzac, translated by Clara Bell
Balzac in a gentle mood, mostly: an old atheist doctor in a small town raises his orphaned goddaughter while his relatives circle the inheritance like polite vultures. You get his usual sharp eye for greed, plus a strange séance-and-ghosts thread that's odd but weirdly moving.