Writers Read: May 2025

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Honoré de Balzac's Père Goriot:

In December of l875, Henry James published a review of the French writer Honoré de Balzac that ran nearly seventeen thousand words. The review can be found in the Library of America’s edition entitled, Henry James: European Writers and The Prefaces. It should be read by anyone with a serious interest in Balzac, and a serious concern with how far the 21st century has fallen below the literary standards, and perhaps not just the literary standards, of the 19th century.

One of the great, if least noticed, differences between what was written then and what is written now, is that writers devoted their lives to what they did. Born in 1799, Balzac spent three years working in a lawyer’s office, the necessary apprenticeship to practice law in France, and then, over the protests of his family, decided to become a writer, and before he was thirty he had written a number of unreadable novels which left him as impoverished as he had been when he started. He learned from his failures, and instead of narrowing, broadened the scope of his ambition. He would write a series of novels that would together describe the human condition, that is to say, the human comedy, the world as it really existed, or at least that part of the world known as Paris. The best of these novels is Père Goriot, a novel Henry James considered among “the few greatest novels we possess.”

Père Goriot begins with nothing of what is usually considered action, nothing that immediately captures the reader’s attention, nothing that creates a sense of mystery or adventure or even anticipation. It opens with the description of a place, a boarding house where no one would live if they could afford something better. Everything about it is dismal.

“In the whole of Paris there is no district more hideous, and none, we must add, more unknown.” The boarding house is four stories high, and of a “squalid appearance,” every squalid detail of which is described. The boarders have their meals on “a long table covered with oilcloth so greasy that a playful diner can autograph it with his finger.” It is a place of poverty, “pinched, concentrated, threadbare poverty,” a place “where all hope and eagerness have been extinguished.”

This goes on for pages, one grim, depressing detail after another. And it is all quite deliberate. “The place in which an event occurred,” explains Henry James, was in Balzac’s view, “of equal moment with the event itself; it was part of the action; it was not a thing to take or to leave, or to be vaguely and gracefully indicated; it imposed itself; it had a part to play; and need to be made as definite as anything else.” It is the same thing with persons as with things. Madame Vauguen, who owns and runs the boarding house, is introduced in a way that make you feel, not that you know her as well, or better, than anyone you have actually met, but someone you would immediately recognize if you happened to see her on the street:

“The apartment is in all its lustre at the moment when, toward seven o’clock in the morning, Madame Vauguen’s cat precedes his mistress, jumping on the side- boards, smelling at the milk contained in several basins covered with plates, and giving forth his matutinal purr. Presently the widow appears, decked out in her tulle cap, under which hangs a crooked band of false hair; as she walks she drags along her wrinkled slippers. Her little plump elderly face, from the middle of which protrudes a nose like a parrot’s beak; her little fat dimpled hands, her whole person, rounded like a church-rat, the waist of her gown, too tight for its contents, which flaps over it, are all in harmony with this room, where misfortune seems to ooze, where speculation lurks in corners, and of which Madame Vauguen inhales the warm, fetid air without being nauseated.”

Among the seven residents of this dreary, unfortunate place are an old man, Goriot, and a young student, Eugene de Rastignac. Goriot has lived there for years, “a kind of automaton, shabbily dressed,” who always has in his hand a “yellow, ivory knobbed cane.” Everyone laughed at him, but, beneath the laughter, was a doubt, a question, a mystery about who he was, and why he was sometimes visited by beautiful women much younger than himself.

Eugene is a recent arrival from the provinces, a distant relative of a countess, Madame de Beauseant, through whom he discovers that the women seen with Goriot are his two daughters, and that while he lives on not much more than forty francs per month, he had once been wealthy enough to have given each of them between four and five hundred thousand francs so they could “be happy and marry well.” Hearing this, Eugene thinks Goriot “sublime!” for the sacrifices he has made. The truth is more prosaic, more ‘real,’ and, from the point of view of character, disappointing. During the Revolution, when famine was imminent, Goriot bought immense quantities of flour and, when it became scarce and people were starving, sold it at ten times the price he paid for it. This was thought only shrewd business, until, after Napoleon was banished and the Bourbons came back, a flour merchant became, for his daughters and their rich and titled husbands, an embarrassment. He went into “voluntary exile,” and when “he saw that his daughters were happy, he realized he had done the right thing.”

The only explanation for this astonishing generosity and self-effacement is that, after his wife, with whom he had been very much in love, died “the instinct of fatherhood developed in Goriot to the point of madness.” And even that explanation may be too charitable. His daughters are married to men with the only things any woman in Paris cares about: money and position; he lives in the penniless monotony of a single darkened room. Eugene lives there as well, but only for the time being, until he gains the success he knows he deserves; the success, he is advised by Madame de Beauseant, that only a woman can help him achieve.

“If women think you clever and talented, the men will think the same,” she tells him. The women, however, are only interested in themselves, and the men are even worse. “You shall really find out how corrupt the women are here, and how desperately vain the men.” Eugene needs a woman who is young, rich, and fashionable. She has someone in mind: Madame de Nucingen, who happens to be Goriot’s daughter, Delphine. Madame de Beauseant has something Madame de Nucingen desperately desires. She “would lick the dirt all the way from the Rue Saint-Lazare to the Rue de Grenelle, to be allowed into my drawing room,” she explains. An introduction into this, the highest circle of Parisian society, will give Eugene everything he wants. “If you introduce her to me, you’ll be her little favorite, she’ll worship you. Love her afterward, if you can; if not, just make use of her.”

Eugene learns quickly. He sees the world as it is: law and morality powerless against wealth, and success the only criterion. He is determined to become “a clever lawyer and a man of fashion,” but decides to postpone his studies to have fifteen months to learn “how to manage women, and perhaps land a fortune.” To land a fortune, however, requires money. Another resident of the boarding house, Vautrin, who is actually an escaped convict, but one with access to the “enormous resources” of the “Ten Thousand Society,” an association of major thieves, will arrange a dowery for Eugene of a million francs, in other words a marriage with a rich woman, in exchange for a one-fifth commission. “Principles,” he tells Eugene, “don’t exist, only events. Laws don’t exist, only circumstances.” At the bottom of every great fortune there is always a crime.

With his looks, his youth, his apparent wealth, Eugene becomes suddenly irresistible. Goriot’s daughter, Delphine, falls madly in love with him; or, rather, falls in love with what she thinks everyone thinks about him: that he has the power to introduce whomever he likes into the only society everyone she knows would give anything to join.

“No one has been as willing to introduce me to this society,” she tells him. “I expect you’re thinking I’m petty and shallow and frivolous, like any other Parisian woman; but do remember that I’m willing to give you everything, and if I’m now more anxious than ever to be received in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, it’s because you’re there.”

Delphine is getting ready to go to a ball, but her father, Goriot, is dying, and Eugene objects.

“But, madam, your father -”

“Please don’t try to teach me my duty to my father,” she interjects. “Not another word, Eugene.”

Eugene knows that, if necessary, she would march over her father’s body to go to the ball, but he has not “the boldness to find fault with her, nor the temerity to offend her, nor the strength to leave her.” And all because, to his surprise, he has fallen in love with her. “A love for which they were both long prepared, had increased by what normally kills love: its gratification. Now that he had possessed her, Eugene realized that before then he had only desired her; he had begun to love her only now that she was his.”

After he had dressed for the ball, she asks him how her father is. “Extremely ill,” he tells her. “If you wish to give me a proof of your love, we will hurry over to see him.”

“So we will,” she replies. “But after the ball.”

But she does not go to visit her father, nor does her sister. As Goriot lays dying, he understands finally that his daughters “both have hearts of stone,” and that they “are vile and criminal!”

At the burial, two carriages drive up. One of them bore the arms of Delphine’s husband, the other the arms of her sister’s husband. Both are empty. They follow the procession to the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise. Eugene, alone, walks to the topmost part of the graveyard and looks down at Paris, gazing “almost avidly on the space between the columns of the Place Vendome and the cupola of Les Invalides. There lived the world into which he had wished to penetrate.”

We expect that, having seen the corruption and the vanity, the arrogance and the ingratitude, of the Parisians he had come to know so well, Eugene will now realize what a mistake it had been to have wanted to be a part of it. But Honoré de Balzac was not interested in telling stories that teach a lesson; he had something more difficult in mind: to describe in all its glorious imperfections the world he saw all around him and then created in his own marvelously powerful mind. Eugene does not turn his back on Paris, he is determined to conquer it.

“Now I’m ready for you!” he cries. As the “first move in the challenge he was flinging at society, he went back to dine with Madame de Nucingen.”

Père Goriot may seem an absurdity, a l9th century melodrama in which a young man without means sets out to conquer the world, and an old man who learns only too late that all his sacrifices, instead of earning the love of his daughters, has earned only their contempt. But then what was it that held our attention; what made us, with each page we turned, want to keep reading? If it was not the story, what was it? Henry James has the answer, an answer that, once we hear it, makes us think we knew it all along: It isn’t the story that held us, it was the story teller. The greatest thing in Balzac is Balzac himself.

“The real, for his imagination, had an authority that it has never had for any other. He is one of the finest of artists and one of the coarsest.”

In what only seems on the surface a contradiction, James can write of him that, “He was a very bad writer, and yet unquestionably he was a very great writer.” Why was he great? “He believed he was almost as creative as the Deity, and that if mankind and human history were swept away the ‘Comedie Humaine’ would be a perfectly adequate substitute for them.” It is a judgment even less subject to doubt now than when it was written a hundred fifty years ago.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseph G. Peterson is the author of several works of fiction and poetry. He grew up in Wheeling, Illinois, received his B.A. from the University of Chicago,

and his MA. from Roosevelt University. The Des Plaines River and the forest preserves surrounding it winds through the town of Wheeling, and through the imaginary territory of many of his books. He currently lives with his family in the Chicago neighborhood, Hyde Park, on the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

Peterson's new novel is The Perturbation of O.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Peterson's reply:

I read fiction, poetry, philosophy, and scholarship. The following are my most recent obsessions.

Richard Flanagan's Question 7 is the book that I'm recommending that everyone read. It tells the story of his father's imprisonment in a Japanese labor camp where his father was subjected to slave labor. It was a notorious labor camp where prisoners were expected to die. Flanagan's father didn't have long to live when a fellow prisoner of Flanagan's father noticed a white flash of light on the horizon at mid-morning. That flash of light would lead to the release of Flanagan's father from the slave camp, and his survival which led ultimately to the birth of Richard Flanagan. The flash of light on the horizon was the bomb going off over Hiroshima. Question 7 is structured in some ways like Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 as the parallelism of the titles suggests, and it grapples with several important moral questions chief among them these two questions: 1) While Flanagan's father survived and Flanagan was therefore born, there were thousands upon thousands of innocent victims of the atomic bomb blast who did not survive, nor were their potential children or their children. What burden does this place on survivors like Richard Flanagan. 2) If a story written by HG Wells can inspire a scientist to imagine and then realize how to achieve an atomic chain reaction, then what burden does this place on HG Wells and the scientist when those imaginings are turned into the bomb that was dropped over Hiroshima?

Lately, I've been reading War and The Iliad and primarily I am re-reading Simone Weil's 'The Iliad or the Poem of Force' which the editors of the volume rightly describe as Weil's "inspired" reading of the Iliad. It's hard to imagine a more primary and profound reading of the Iliad than Weil's. Indeed, one can almost read it as an essential translation of the poem. Weil's conception of the subjugating power of force to convert that person upon whom force is released into "an object" and the corrupting power of force to convert that person deploying the force into "an object" and the conjoining of the two persons as "victims of force" leads her to think clearly about the nature of war, of hubris, of the in-human condition of human bondage, and into the meaning of karma. As Weil states in her essay, the Biblical injunction, "He who uses the sword shall perish of the sword" was greatly preceded by the lesson of force provided by the Iliad. Weil's essay exposes the fundamental truth of the Iliad, which in turn exposes a fundamental truth about the use of force, which in turn exposes the primary power of art to deliver powerful concepts of truth about the conditions of life that we are subject to.

Reading War and The Iliad reminds me of another remarkable translation of the Iliad called War Music by Christopher Logue. This sparse, almost Spartan, rendition of the poem written in the contemporary idiom of modern warfare brings the insights of the Iliad to bear on our contemporary condition of war just as beautiful as this rendition of the Iliad in the contemporary idiom of our era of war brings insight to bear on Homer's Iliad.

Finally, but most happily, I have been reading Edward L. Shaughnessey's translation of The Classic of Poetry which collects the oldest written and rhymed poetry in the world. The poems are so ancient that the reader needs some assimilation into the poetry, but the introduction by Shaughnessey who in addition to being the translator is the premier scholar of the poetry helps to place the poetry into context. Once the reader does assimilate to these poems which are called "aires" it's easy to see the song-like structure of the poems and to feel the remarkable beauty of the poetry, which accounts for why they have been read continuously since they were first collected.