The Unknown Masterpiece

Honoré De Balzac (1799-1850) is generally credited as the inventor of the modern realistic novel. In more than ninety novels, he set forth French society and life as he saw it. He created a cast of over two thousand individual and identifiable characters, some of whom reappear in different novels. He organized his works into his masterpiece, La Comedie Humaine, which was the final result of his attempt to grasp the whole of society and experience into one varied but unified work. »

Richard Howard was born in Cleveland in 1929. He is the author of fourteen volumes of poetry and has published more than one hundred fifty translations from the French, including works by Gide, Stendhal, de Beauvoir, Baudelaire, and de Gaulle. Howard received a National Book Award for his translation of Fleurs du mal and a Pulitzer Prize for Untitled Subjects, a collection of poetry. »

By Honoré de Balzac
Translated from the French by Richard Howard
Introduction by Arthur C. Danto

A New York Review Books Original

One of Honoré de Balzac's most celebrated tales, "The Unknown Masterpiece" is the story of a painter who, depending on one's perspective, is either an abject failure or a transcendental genius—or both. The story, which has served as an inspiration to artists as various as Cézanne, Henry James, Picasso, and New Wave director Jacques Rivette, is, in critic Dore Ashton's words, a "fable of modern art."

Published here in a new translation by poet Richard Howard, "The Unknown Masterpiece" appears, as Balzac intended, with "Gambara," a grotesque and tragic novella about a musician undone by his dreams.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

The greatest novelist of the nineteenth century and perhaps of all time.
— The New York Times

Also see:

The Life of Henry Brulard
By Stendhal
Preface by Lydia Davis
Translated and with an introduction by John Sturrock

The Life of Henry Brulard is a vivid memoir that is also an extraordinary work of the imagination.

Monsieur Proust
By Céleste Albaret
Translated from the French by Barbara Bray
Foreword by André Aciman

This lovely book is as close as we can come to meeting Proust in person.

The Child
By Jules Vallès
Edited and with an introduction by Douglas Parmée

Vallès's book is one of the funniest books in French literature, a triumph of insubordinate comedy over the forces of order and the self-appointed defenders of decency.

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.00
Price: $10.50 (25% off)

Aug 31, 2000
160 pages
ISBN: 0940322749
9780940322745
All Literature in Translation
NYRB Classics
Visual & Performing Arts
Literature in French

Find us on Facebook