Contents:
Please choose whether or not you want other users to be able to see on your profile that this library is a favorite of yours. Finding libraries that hold this item You may have already requested this item. Please select Ok if you would like to proceed with this request anyway. WorldCat is the world's largest library catalog, helping you find library materials online. Don't have an account? Your Web browser is not enabled for JavaScript. Some features of WorldCat will not be available.
Create lists, bibliographies and reviews: Search WorldCat Find items in libraries near you. Advanced Search Find a Library. Your list has reached the maximum number of items. Please create a new list with a new name; move some items to a new or existing list; or delete some items.
The Wild Ass's Skin and millions of other books are available for Amazon Kindle. . With more than 1, titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the . for "la peau de chagrin" translates not only as "the wild donkey's skin" (or. Wild Asss Skin by Honoré Balzac . The Wild Ass's Skin (Penguin Classics): Honoré de Balzac The Wild Ass's Skin: (La Peau De Chagrin) (Classics).
Your request to send this item has been completed. Citations are based on reference standards. However, formatting rules can vary widely between applications and fields of interest or study. The specific requirements or preferences of your reviewing publisher, classroom teacher, institution or organization should be applied.
The E-mail Address es field is required. To ask other readers questions about The Wild Ass's Skin , please sign up.
Lists with This Book. Set in early 19th-century Paris, it tells the story of a young man who finds a magic piece of shagreen that fulfills his every desire. For each wish granted, however, the skin shrinks and consumes a portion of his physical energy. Before the book was completed, Balzac created excitement about it by publishing a series of articles and story fragments in several Parisian journals.
Although he was five months late in delivering the manuscript, he succeeded in generating sufficient interest that the novel sold out instantly upon its publication. A second edition, which included a series of twelve other "philosophical tales", was released one month later. Nov 02, Jonfaith rated it really liked it.
He made fun of everything, his own prospects included. Always short of money, he remained, like all men with a future before them, wallowing in inexpressible idleness, condensing a whole book into one epigram for the benefit of people who were incapable of putting one witticism into a whole book.
Lavish of promises that he never kept, he had made his fortune and reputation into a cushion on which he slept, thus running the risk of coming to his senses, as an old man, in an almshouse. With all th He made fun of everything, his own prospects included. With all that, keeping faith with his friends to the point of death, a swaggering cynic and as simple-hearted as a child, he worked only by fits and starts or under the spur of necessity. This marked my return to Balzac, a welcome one after many years. When I spend time with my friends' children I make point of telling them to avoid Zola and stick with Balzac.
The Wild Ass's Skin is simply stunning. The depictions of emotional uncertainty and the fluctuations of fortune were remarkable. The display of ornate and obscure objects, avocations and sundry theory were equally compelling. View all 4 comments. The book is closed. I remain fascinated by the descriptions that, once I was immersed in the atmosphere allowed me to imagine every detail. I think the appearance of the old man who will reveal the shagreen to Raphael.
The diabolical dimension of shagreen is paralleled with "The Damnation of Faust" by the author himself and it is interesting. This era of the 19th century is seen by an author living in that period. This is quite different from a contemporary author who brings the past. The pace of The book is closed. The pace of our current books is much faster. Obviously, our lives too. Jun 02, Blair rated it really liked it Shelves: The Wild Ass's Skin - or The Magic Skin , as it's known in some editions neither of those titles are particularly appealing, I know - is a literary novel of magical realism.
It's simultaneously a fantasy, a study of character, and a cautionary 'be careful what you wish for' tale. At the beginning we are introduced to a young man who seems deep in despair, gambling away his last coins and thereafter contemplating suicide. Delaying the hour of his impending death, Raphael as we learn he's called The Wild Ass's Skin - or The Magic Skin , as it's known in some editions neither of those titles are particularly appealing, I know - is a literary novel of magical realism.
Delaying the hour of his impending death, Raphael as we learn he's called wanders into an antique shop, where he happens across a strange object which appears to be cut from the hide of an animal. This, the shopkeeper tells him, is a talisman, with the power to fulfil any wish made by the person who possesses it. The old man tries to warn Raphael that the wishes are granted at a terrible price, and extols the virtue of acquiring knowledge and wisdom instead, but Raphael has become fixated on the skin and immediately makes his first wish - for a decadent party - which does indeed come true, in fact as soon as he walks out of the shop, when he encounters some old friends who are on their way to a ball.
What follows is partly an exploration of what happens when Raphael's wishes are fulfilled, and partly Raphael's backstory, much of which he tells to a friend in a lengthy monologue, giving the effect of another first-person narrative within the main narrative. The main thing you need to know is that Raphael is completely and utterly awful. He is unbelievably selfish and self-obsessed throughout. He manages to complain of poverty and destitution when he owns an entire island yes, an island. Great swathes of his own story are taken up with him whining and complaining about how women don't want him, and why not, when he's so handsome and such a genius in his opinion and so willing to devote himself to them?
He is, in fact, a proto-Nice Guy through and through. He falls for a beautiful countess, Feodora, who rebuffs his advances but takes great pains to demonstrate that she values his friendship. He reacts by ignoring this and continuing his efforts to force her to love him, ranting about how he loves her enough to kill her, declaring his intention to have his revenge on women in general, and creepily following her around.
Ultimately he goes to the extreme of sneaking into her house and spending a night in her bedroom, hiding behind a curtain, to watch her sleep. He goes on to gamble and drink away all his money and more besides, before eventually settling for the simpering Pauline who's nearly as annoying as him - although, rather conveniently, he doesn't realise how much he 'loves' her until she's attained money and something of a status in society.
It will be up to the individual reader to decide whether or not he or she can get past the unpleasantness of Raphael's character, and most of the other characters aren't particularly likeable either, although I did like Feodora, with her commitment to independence, and the fearsome Aquilina. Personally, I found the narrative so enjoyable to read that I could deal with this fairly easily - but, that said, my rating might have been five stars if I'd been able to root for Raphael.
Although the language is rich and complex, this is a very readable novel, and that makes it more accessible than you might at first expect. The themes, especially with regards to relationships, are surprisingly modern and consequently much of the interaction between characters doesn't seem dated. This is a banquet of a book. Its detail, description and depth demanded I slow my usual reading pace in order to appreciate and understand everything in it.
Although the narrative is driven forward by an underlying plot, it often isn't really about the 'magic skin' and the wishes: It's funny too, with a great deal of dry humour and irony, and a dash of playfulness. I can't comment on how The Wild Ass's Skin compares to Balzac's other novels, this being the first thing I've read by the author, but I can say it's a good place to start. Mar 16, Maria rated it liked it. This isn't the edition I read. My book is one translated by Atwood Townsend, with an excellent afterword by Henri Peyre. French title is Le Peau de chagrin.
Poor young poet shades of Sorrowing Werther contemplates suicide, procures a magical piece of leather that grants wishes but the talisman shrinks when he wishes. Unfortunately, I found protagonist Raphael so distasteful as a character I was continually annoyed, and then the ending, which falls entirely and con This isn't the edition I read.
Unfortunately, I found protagonist Raphael so distasteful as a character I was continually annoyed, and then the ending, which falls entirely and contradictorily and frustratingly flat, disgruntled me more. Balzac's extraordinary detail, his characterizations they are types - the suffering poet, the cold callous harlotty woman, the virginal girl Pauline, who reveals herself at the very end as something other than she seemed , his ideas. We meet Rastignac and Taillefer here, perhaps for the first time in The Human Comedy, and are treated to marvelous descriptions of gluttonous bacchanalia.
But while I loved the philosophy and portrayal of Parisian excesses, the novel didn't work for me. Balzac has written a sort of black comedy abounding in weirdness and allegory and juxtaposition of reality and fantasy, playing some kind of colossal joke, and I'm just too annoyed to appreciate it. So skip this unless you're reading all of Balzac, and don't mind a fable of phantasmagoria and irrationality and annoyance.
It's brilliant, of course. View all 9 comments. I read this book at university in French and it was one of my favourite books. I've since read it in English and it seems to lack something - "je ne sais quoi" but still it is a wonderful book. Balzac is one of my favourite authors. He has such a style about him and he has turned this simple story into a richly flavoured one. His surprise indeed overwhelms him when he serendipitou I read this book at university in French and it was one of my favourite books.
His surprise indeed overwhelms him when he serendipitously enters an antique shop and finds a shagreen which he purchases. It should be mentioned that it was the antique dealer who asked him to look at the hide. Eine Person fand diese Informationen hilfreich. Die hilfreichsten Kundenrezensionen auf Amazon.
The title, in fact, is a play on words in the original French, for "la peau de chagrin" translates not only as "the wild donkey's skin" or "shagreen," to use the technical term for this kind of hide but also as "the skin of sadness. While waiting for night to arrive, he wanders into a shop where he encounters an old man who presents him with the magic skin of the title. The skin, he says, will grant Raphael anything he wishes, but each wish will cause the skin to shrink until, when it contracts to nothing, Raphael's life will end.
Readers familiar with nineteenth-century European literature will recognize that this text is partly a response to Goethe's Faust, a work which repopularized this medieval legend for the romantic age. Largely absent from Balzac's Faustian tale, however, is the religious dimension. Although Raphael does have a symbolic encounter with a portrait of Christ painted by his Renaissance namesake shortly before receiving the skin, the object of Balzac's philosophical study falls firmly on the human limitations of his main character.
Raphael is a stereotype, but deliberately so, for Balzac designs him for a number of overlapping purposes. Primarily, of course, he is an everyman, sharing enough in common with the average reader that we easily understand his temptation in taking the skin.
He is only human, after all, and it is the folly inherent to human desire that is the central focus of this novel. The typical plot of a novel is designed around the struggle to get something you don't have: Balzac brilliantly reverses this scenario and considers whether humans would be happy if all obstacles to fulfillment were removed, if everything we wanted in life were simply handed to us on a plate.
The result, as the reader witnesses in the case of Raphael, is unexpectedly tragic, and yet in a way that makes relentless, terrifying sense. Balzac masterfully unfolds his parable about the paradoxes of human desire in three movements: Balzac has a reputation for unsentimental endings, but there is a wonderfully ambiguous olive branch that is extended to Raphael at the end that will leave the careful reader wondering for a long time what Balzac actually intended to say in this conclusion.
Readers should be aware that The Wild Ass's Skin is a complex novel, one that requires a certain level of skill and historical understanding to unlock all its various layers. Some passages may seem obscure or unnecessarily decorative, but believe me, there are ideas fizzing about in those pages that are worth learning about. I have focused mainly on the elements of the story that transcend Balzac's time, for instance, but there are some wonderfully pointed jabs at the French society of Balzac's lifetime that can be understood by reading Raphael's character as an embodiment of Restoration France, a political husk that finally ran out of magical wishes of its own with the July Revolution of , a year before this novel was published.
It is a brilliantly insightful meditation on the paradox of human desire, wherein the difficulty of obtaining what we desire, rather than the object of desire itself, plays a key part in our overall satisfaction. Balzac's fable shows us how we as human beings, lacking the wisdom of this insight, are often the architects of our own folly and unhappiness, taking the easy road to tedious comfort when what we really want is the challenge of finding a more profound happiness.
As a novel, it deserves three stars. With it's now famous central idea, the Peau de chagrin, with its granting of underserved rewards at the expense of one's health, it deserves five. The novel often rich in detail is not Balzac's best but deserves to be read, if quickly.
This strange, Faustian novel is a mixed bag.
Reading certain parts is like wading through a bog. For example, I recommend skipping pages , in which a would-be suicide reflects upon the nature of existence and instead of seeing his own life pass before his eyes is treated to a grandiose historical retrospective encompassing "whole countries, reigns and eras" The plot of "The Wild Ass's Skin" centers upon Raphael de Valentin, a young man of good family who has fallen upon hard times and has decided to end his life. Raphael is a man of talent, a writer who for several years has toiled, not unhappily, on a huge treatise.
He leads a monk-like existence in a garret apartment, but he does have some interaction with people and finds a peculiar joy in the contemplative life. His world is disrupted when two events occur simultaneously: Initially drawn to this woman for mercenary reasons Raphael hopes that if he becomes a regular member of her salon, the lady and her coterie will use their influence to publicize his book , he soon falls hopelessly and pathetically in love.
Realizing that a man doesn't score with the ladies -- at least not the society ladies -- unless he invests a great deal of money in his personal appearance as well as in gifts, flowers, taxis, theatre tickets, etc, Raphael abandons his studious life and fritters away what little money he has in an effort to win her.