 Balzac experimented with this method throughout the thirty years he worked on La Comédie humaine . It enabled a depth of characterization that went beyond simple narration or dialogue . " When the characters reappear " , notes the critic Samuel Rogers , " they do not step out of nowhere ; they emerge from the privacy of their own lives which , for an interval , we have not been allowed to see . " Although the complexity of these characters ' lives inevitably led Balzac to make errors of chronology and consistency , the mistakes are considered minor in the overall scope of the project . Readers are more often troubled by the sheer number of people in Balzac 's world , and feel deprived of important context for the characters . Detective novelist Arthur Conan Doyle said that he never tried to read Balzac , because he " did not know where to begin " . 
