The Death of Balzac

Here presented in English for the first time in a translation by Brian Stableford is one of Octave Mirbeaus darkest works: a fictionalized account of the death of the giant of French letters ­Honoré de Balzac.Among his journalistic endeavors Mirbeau contributed a large number of short stories to the newspapers in the fin-de-siècle period and he honed his skill in that kind of work to near-perfection. Many of his anecdotal short stories make the customary tokenistic pretences to be true and there is a considerable gray area between his explicit works of fiction and articles that represent themselves falsely as reportage. None of his other impostures of that ­ambiguous kind however are quite as brazen or as seductively ­persuasive in their deception as the triptych making up The Death of Balzac which seen purely as a literary exercise is a masterpiece of sorts in terms of the persuasiveness of its mendacious execution and the elegance of its narration. It is a gripping and affectively powerful story artful in its very atrocity; a prime specimen of the work of an exceptional writer.