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The Wild Ass's Skin: (La Peau de Chagrin) (Classics)
 
 

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The Wild Ass's Skin: (La Peau de Chagrin) (Classics) (Paperback)

by Honore Balzac (Author), Herbert Hunt (Translator) "Towards the end of October 1830 a young man entered the Palais-Royal1 just as the gambling-houses were opening in conformity with the law which protects..." (more)
4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Classics; Reprint edition (30 Jun 1977)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0140443304
  • ISBN-13: 978-0140443301
  • Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 2.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 65,843 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #2 in  Books > Fiction > The Classics > Balzac, Honore de

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Product Description

Product Description

Balzac is concerned with the choice between ruthless self-gratification and asceticism, dissipation and restraint, in a novel that is powerful in its symbolism and realistic depiction of decadence.

About the Author

Balzac was born in 1799, the son of a civil servant. At the age of thirty - heavily in debt and with an unsucessful past behind him - he started work on the first of what were to become a total of ninety novels and short stories that make up The Human Comedy. He died in 1850.
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First Sentence
Towards the end of October 1830 a young man entered the Palais-Royal1 just as the gambling-houses were opening in conformity with the law which protects an essentially taxable passion. Read the first page
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Average Customer Review
4.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars the wild ass's skin, 21 Jun 2006
By Mr. John A. D. Weir (Hull England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
If you only read one Balzac novel read this one .In its conception and execution as complete as Anna Karenina. It tells the story of a initially destitute young man comtemplating suicide, great opening scene where he gambles his last money, he then enters a curiosity shop where he is given an animal skin which will give him everything he desires but will shrink in response to the degree of his request. Thus the novel explores how we are damaged by attainment of the things we desire, all Balzac is good but in my view this is the best
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars BALZAC DISTILLED, 20 Feb 2009
By Deborah H. Maccoby (London, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Honore de Balzac divided his vast Human Comedy into "Studies of Manners" and "Philosophical Studies" - and in "The Wild Ass's Skin" we have the earliest and most important of the 'Philosophical Studies'. Balzac wrote in a letter of 1834: "In the 'Studies of Manners", I shall have depicted human feelings and their action, life and its tendencies. In the 'Philosophical Studies', I shall explain the cause of those feelings and the foundations on which life rests".

"The Wild Ass's Skin" is thus a philosophical allegory,concerned primarily with the conflict between the life of the senses and the life of the mind, between power, will and sensuality on the one hand and knowledge and thought on the other - a theme which runs throughout all Balzac's novels. A young man, on the verge of suicide because of lack of money, decides to distract his last hours by looking round an old curiosity shop, full of ancient objects, owned by a mysterious old man, and agrees, in a kind of Faustian pact, to become the owner of an ancient, magic, oriental ass's skin, which will grant his every wish, but which will diminish in size whenever a wish is granted - leading to a corresponding dimunition in the wisher's lifespan.

The allegorical nature of this novel gives it a great interest, but also considerable limitations. I do not think Balzac's philosophical works are as great as his Studies of Manners, such as the masterpieces "Old Goriot" or "Lost Illusions". Many great novelists and poets - for instance, William Blake or W. B Yeats - have had "systems" underlying their work which are less important than the rounded, flesh and blood characters and scenes and the achieved poems themselves. Nonetheless, I think it would be a mistake to dismiss these "systems", since they are inextricably bound up with and do give us a great insight into the author's greatest work.

I think all this applies to Balzac's work too. So this novel is, in my view, not a masterpiece but, as an exposition or distillation of the ideas underlying Balzac's work, extremely interesting and very much worth reading.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing!, 8 Dec 2009
A truly great novel and one that readers' familiar with Balzac's work may find very interesting. I think the novel occupies a unique place in his fiction as it gives an insight into the development of his style of realism, but is also one of his most imaginative and fantastic plot lines. This combination allows him to create a stark allegory on human nature and our desires. Surely one of the greatest novels ever written.
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