Colonel Chabert

Rating:
Summary: "the depths of the human heart."
Review: "Colonel Chabert" is the story of a soldier--a great favourite of Napoleon's who is left for dead following the battle of Eylau. Chabert literally digs himself out of a mass grave and is nursed slowly back to health. Unfortunately, Chabert's severe head wound caused permanent memory loss, and it is years before Chabert clearly remembers who he is.

After fragments of his memory return, Chabert contacts his wife--unfortunately, she has remarried and is now the Countess Ferraud, and it is in her best interests that Chabert remain dead and forgotten and that she remain the sole wealthy recipient of the Chabert fortune. So she ignores the letters Chabert sends.

Desperately poor, in bad health, and nursing a growing sense of injustice, Chabert seeks out the services of an ambitious and fascinating young lawyer named Derville. Derville is intrigued with Chabert's story and decides that Chabert is either the victim of a terrible injustice or "the most accomplished actor" he has ever seen. And so Derville sets out to regain at least a portion of Chabert's fortune....

Balzac is one of my favourite authors, and I've read many of his works. "Colonel Chabert" is novella length, but it is better described as a sketch of a novel. For anyone trying Balzac for the first time, I recommend starting with either "Cousin Bette" or "The Black Sheep." "Colonel Chabert" is perhaps not the best Balzac novel to start with as it is certainly not a good example of Balzac's extraordinary talent, but the novella certainly serves nicely as a later supplement to Balzac's better novels. I have to say that the film version is actually even better than the novel--and it's usually the other way around. In the novel, Countess Ferraud is a grasping, selfish, pitiless ambitious woman--in the film, she is portrayed much more sympathetically. Also, the visual media of film allowed much greater scope for such scenes as the dead on the frozen battlefield--this was not conveyed with such power in the novel. Nonetheless, "Colonel Chabert" follows Balzac's favourite themes--greed and human motivation---displacedhuman--Amazon Reviewer.

Rating:
Summary: The best translation...
Review: ...of a great Balzac novella. Ms. Cosman captures the rigorous, logical quality of Balzac's prose - most translators get lost in unidiomatic wordiness. This 100 page novella showcases the Master's comfort with legal matters, his profound understanding of "the fang and the claw" and features at its center the incomparable Derville, Balzac's great, recurring lawyer character. I usually recommend Pere Goriot for first-time Balzac readers because of the rich connections between that novel and many other Balzac works - but I am hard pressed to imagine a better one-course meal than this rendering of Colonel Chabert by Ms. Cosman. I certainly plan to read her version of The Girl with the Golden Eyes.

Rating:
Summary: The best translation...
Review: ...of a great Balzac novella. Ms. Cosman captures the rigorous, logical quality of Balzac's prose - most translators get lost in unidiomatic wordiness. This 100 page novella showcases the Master's comfort with legal matters, his profound understanding of "the fang and the claw" and features at its center the incomparable Derville, Balzac's great, recurring lawyer character. I usually recommend Pere Goriot for first-time Balzac readers because of the rich connections between that novel and many other Balzac works - but I am hard pressed to imagine a better one-course meal than this rendering of Colonel Chabert by Ms. Cosman. I certainly plan to read her version of The Girl with the Golden Eyes.

Rating:
Summary: Dead Men Do Tell Tales
Review: Balzac, one of the greatest writers who ever lived, did not trip up with this one. I read it with great pleasure and conclude, as people so often say, that the movie based on the story did not equal the original. Ever the cynic (some might say 'the realist') Balzac portrays here the efforts of a noble-minded soldier, who rose from an orphanage to serve his country under Napoleon in Egypt and eastern Europe, only to reap the all-too-common fate of dedicated and true warriors---to be forgotten and ignored. Death (which he accepted) might have seized him, but he found a living death, a denial of his sanity and identity, as the reward of his service. Reported killed at the battle of Eylau, against the Russians, after a heroic action, the soldier literally crawls from his grave to a kind of shadowy survival. In his earlier life, Colonel Chabert had raised a woman to his own status, but now finds that she is unwilling to let others learn of her origins and does not want to recognize that he is, in fact, her long lost husband. Honestly thinking she was widowed, she married a highborn aristocrat who knew nothing of her humble beginnings.

The tale is one of greed, intrigue, loyalty and disloyalty. As usual, Balzac manages to cast a light, pitiless and bright, on every rotten corner of the human condition, while offering a few inspiring examples in contrast. Every detail of a lawyer's life in 19th century Paris is scrutinized, every glimpse of urban dairyman or elite country squirehood rings true. No wonder I admire him so much, no wonder I have no hesitation in urging you to read COLONEL CHABERT and any other volume of Balzac you can lay your hands on.

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Translation of a Masterful Story!
Review: Carol Cosman does a masterful job of translating Balzac's story of COLONEL CHABERT. The book is 101 pages of fast and fascinating reading. I loved Balzac's quip about the three professionals who cannot appreciate the world: the priest, the doctor, and the lawyer... the unhappiest of whom is the lawyer whose "offices are gutters that cannot be cleansed." Everyone should read this book. It will appeal equally to realists and optimists and to those who partake in social criticism or simply enjoy a good story.

Rating:
Summary: TRAGEDY DISTILLED
Review: One of the greatest novelists of all time, Balzac was most at home in the Paris of Post-Napoleonic Paris. In a time when the middle class was showing its strength and starting to reach towards the aristocracy, Balzac shows just how selfish and grubby and greedy humans can be in attaining and how treacherous they can be in keeping their all important upward mobility.

Colonel Chabert is a man disfigured in the Napoleonic Wars who was left for dead on a battlefield. After digging his way out of a mass grave, he finds that he has no legal right to his title or his massive estate. Nobody will believe his true identity. For ten longe years he goes about trying to communicate his plight to anyone who will listen. They only see a crazy bum, and his wife rebuffs his letters. She already has a new husband and kids. Finally Chabert is able to convince a lawyer named Dervilles to accept his case, namely that of reclaiming his title, lands, and wife. The problem is that noone is really interested in his life being resurrected. Most people would rather that he remained dead. So begins the ludicrous battle of a man against the law to prove his own existence.

This short but great novel, or novella, is a tragic take on the world's thirst for social status and the judgement by visuals that our society is only too guilty of to this day. If it walks like a bum, talks like a bum, it must be a bum. Colonel Chabert has such a hard time convincing people of his identity because of how they perceive him. It sounds echoes of Frankenstein in that a good man is reduced to a monster when all he really needs is love. The fact that even his wife wishes he were dead just drives home the isolated suffering of the book. As in all Balzac novels, you feel a world moving under the mantle of the book. The Human Comedy of Balzac is one of the crowning achievements of literature and ranks right up there with Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy.

Rating:
Summary: L'une des merveilles de la Comedie Humaine
Review: With this novel, Balzac continued to place himself among the most influential and appreciated writers of world literature. Balzac, along with Shakespeare, gave a new meaning to the word "human". This is an extraordinary and rich novel narrating the glory and downfall of Colonel Chabert. I won't summarize the whole work here since I imagine that you have had enough of that so far, so I will just say that this novel is about a human being's inability to re-enter a society that has long forgotten about him. The imagery in this novel is extraordinary and a wonderful scene occurs when the Colonel is first described: poking through the darkness...like a Rembrandt and that careful construction of light and darkness. It is exquisite! Don't miss this novel. If you like this one, I recommend: Le Pere Goriot, Eugenie Grandet, Cousine Bette, and La Peau de Chagrin. Enjoy!