Parent-child reading | Children's Literature "Tall Old Man"

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I would like to ask you a question at the beginning, in the era without computers, how many words do you think a writer can write in a day? Five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand, fifty thousand can not be more, right?

If you think so, you can only say that your imagination is not enough. Today I would like to introduce a prolific writer, who is the famous French novelist Balzac. Legend has it that he spent 16 hours a day writing, using an average of one bottle of ink and replacing ten nibs every three days. Without outside interference, he completed at least dozens of pages of manuscripts every day, and it took him only three days to write this masterpiece of more than 300,000 words, "Tall Old Man".

It's jaw-dropping. Although this legend may not be true, we can also feel Balzac's surging creative enthusiasm. He has created hundreds of works in nearly 20 years, and the "Tall Old Man" to be shared today is actually part of Balzac's "Human Comedy", which he created with his life's work. A tome of more than 90 independent and related novels, it has been hailed as the "encyclopedia of capitalist society.".

Set in Paris in the early 19th century, Tall Old Man tells two parallel and intersecting stories. The old man Gaurio, a retired flour merchant, who was squeezed out of the last bit of hard-earned money by his two daughters, died lonely and tragically in the attic of the Fugai apartment, and the provincial youth Rastigné was constantly changing under the corrosion of Vanity Fair in Paris. After witnessing the tragedy of the old man being abandoned by his daughter, the last sense of justice in his body was also worn away little by little by the unforgiving reality.

Balzac passed shabby apartments, as well as luxurious aristocratic salons. These two alternating main stages paint a picture of the materialism and extreme ugliness of Parisian society, and it is not difficult to see in this novel that the author is trying to describe people in all classes extensively. In the Fugai apartment, we saw three religions and nine streams, all kinds of people, including landladys who fell into the eyes of money, old girls who could not marry out, single sticks who could not marry wives, and mysterious Jiangyang thieves, poor students in embarrassing situations, and so on.

This group of people belonged to the people at the bottom of this great pyramid, crammed into this small apartment, and they formed a small pyramid through the layering of the apartment, in this place, people wantonly oppressed the weak, without the slightest scruples about the tall old man who lived in the worst room, and was ridiculed by all kinds of people, and whoever was in a bad mood could step on him and scold him.

Corresponding to this place is Madame De Beauséjon, the home of Rastigné's cousin. Madame De Beauséjon's mansion was the "fuguet apartment" of the nobility, where the various dukes and counts, as well as their wives and lovers, formed a chain of contempt. It's just that in contrast, everyone here has a mask of hypocrisy. They will not show the oppression of the weak so nakedly, but they will be more indifferent and vicious, and there will be no accumulation of capital. Rastigné, a novice who has just stepped into Vanity Fair, is the tall old man in "Bosseon's Apartment", fusing so many characters together that the novel "Tall Old Man" is like a slowly unfolding, "Qingming on the River".-style picture.

Balzac once said that he would act as a historian as a novelist, to describe the history of French customs with his own novels, and he compared French society to a historian, and he was only the secretary of this historian. Balzac tried to objectively and truthfully record the appearance of people and events in society in his novels, and he hoped to show a deeper and closer history to ordinary people in this way. He also loudly called for "no more history to be treated as a morgue, a household register of a nation, a skeleton of chronicles."

Therefore, when reading "The Tall Old Man", the more sensitive reader can feel very obviously that the author is telling the whole story very rationally. From a macroscopic point of view, whether it is the money and life of the tall old man, little by little, it is consumed by the daughters. Or is Rastigné's conscience slowly being worn away, it is an orderly process.

The author is like a cold eye watching a burning fire, slowly extinguishing, but from a microscopic point of view, Balzac has given feelings to these characters, he uses a very delicate writing to describe the inner struggles of these characters, for example, when he writes about Rastigné to his mother and sister, when he writes to ask for money, he thinks of two pure and innocent sisters, who have lost all their dowries for their future, and their mother has a very hard life, but she still has to find a way to raise money for him, and when he writes, he can't help but cry.

Madame Desés Beauséon, who is full of charm and charm, is betrayed by her lover, and all the nobles of Paris come to the ground, but she dares to fight back with a grand ball. This once-mighty socialite, wearing a white dress, bid farewell to the dirty and hypocritical Vanity Fair, and revealed a tragic beauty in the desolation.

Balzac is also very good at portraying "typical characters", and in the novel "The Tall Old Man", there is a huge group of people who are similar to him. The flour merchant tall old man was the epitome of thousands of commercial upstarts in French society at that time. Rastigné, on the other hand, is the epitome of an ambitionist who wants to attain a higher social status by relying on his connections and ingenuity.

In his novels, Balzac magnifies their personality traits with exaggerated brushwork, which makes the whole story more dramatic. For example, the old man's love for his two daughters has reached an incomprehensible point, he knows that the two daughters are more interested in his money, but he still frantically sells his property to meet the demands of the two daughters. It was his unrestrained coddling, indulging his two daughters, confined, pressing step by step, facing the infinite demands of these two daughters, he also had to deceive himself over and over again, "My daughter loves me."

How stupid and ridiculous it is, but when we see the ragged old man, crying and saying to Rastigné, "If they call me father objectively, then I will be cold." When they called me Dad, I saw what they looked like when they were young. I think it's their father, just wipe their skirts, as long as they walk, how good it is."

Deep inside, we will be touched by His pure fatherly love. In addition to being good at grasping "typical people", Balzac also paid great attention to the description of "typical environment". The work revolves around Rastigné's activities and depicts the living conditions of people of different classes and classes in Paris.

The fuguet apartment in the civilian area was full of "closed, moldy, sour smell" and stuffed with dirty and greasy furniture, while the home of the two daughters of the tall old man, although there was a splendid house and this valuable artifact, the living room full of Italian oil paintings was "decorated like a café", showing an unbearable pomp and circumstance. Rastigné's cousin's house, on the other hand, showed a completely different style, with not only gorgeous carriages with strong horses in her yard, a large staircase full of flowers on both sides, but even the doorman wore a delicate and exquisite gold-rimmed big red uniform.

These details set off the elegant style of the old-school aristocratic "leader". The depiction of these meticulous environments is also conducive to showing the changes in the personality of the characters. When Rastigné returned from the ornate rich quarters to the Voguet apartment, Balzac wrote, "Walking into the foul-smelling dining room, where 18 diners, like cattle in front of the manger, were eating, he felt that this poor and sour appearance was extremely ugly with the scene of the dining room, and the environmental change was too abrupt, and the contrast was too strong, so it stimulated his ambitions in particular."

Rastigné, who had already enjoyed the life of high society, was no longer willing to be poor, and finally he was determined to dirty his hands, smear his conscience, and desperately pounce upwards. Of course, some critics believe that Balzac's depiction of the environment is too detailed, which makes his work seem cumbersome.

In view of this, Mr. Xu Baogeng made a very interesting analogy in the "Fifteen Lectures on Western Literature". He said, "When you read Balzac's work, you feel like a clumsy peasant woman making a fire. She wanted to light the firewood, but the firewood was a little damp and could not be lit. The house was filled with smoke, and the choking man tried to withdraw from the room, and just at this moment, with a bang, the firewood was lit, and the fire reflected half the sky."

Therefore, when reading, children should not be impatient with a large number of descriptions of the environment and appearance, but should use the words of the author to use their brains to imagine the specific picture, but there are often a lot of detailed descriptions in Why Balzac's novels.

There is an interesting saying that Balzac wanted to increase the word count of the novel in this way so that he could get more money. Why? This has to share Balzac's life experience.

Balzac's life was full of ups and downs, he entered law school in his early years, and after graduation, despite the strong opposition of his parents, he still embarked on the road of literary creation. But the first five-act poetic tragedy, Cromwell, failed. Even his father laughed at his lack of literary talent. Then he once abandoned the literature to run a business, but he did not expect to fail.

The failure of this business left him in debt and dragged him down for the rest of his life. He had to pay off his debts by writing like crazy, but Balzac, a man of great talent, was not willing to live a poor life. Like Rastigné in the book, he was ambitious to become a "man of men", so he also wanted to gain status by making friends with high-society noblewomen. So he always had to pay his own manuscript fees in advance for the publisher. After that, he began to rush to pay off the debt, and thus fell into a vicious circle.

It is said that in order to resist the drowsiness of writing, the great writer drank about 50 cups of coffee a day. On the surface, he hates money, but in his bones he dreams of getting rich, and mentally despises getting rich, and it is Balzac himself who is full of contradictions, and we will see in his novels Rastigné, who is determined to deal with Vanity Fair by any means. In front of the grave of the tall old man, he buried his last tears.

The rich and profound life experience is the source of Balzac's creation. Whatever purpose he wrote The Tall Old Man, it is worth reading over and over again.

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Zhao Zijun, an article a day, recording work life, reading and learning. Be a seed that spreads love.

Public number: Zhao Jun. Writing is not just about recording, it is evoking some beautiful hearts that are sleeping.