Title: Please, don't feel compelled to read the classics
Review: While Balzac is clearly a genius and Reed does an incredible job translating, this book is not a good story, but just a platform to get the author's views on society and human nature across. There are exhaustingly long descriptions of places and characters, and endless monologues. In the end we don't find out what happens to one of the key characters, and it just seemed like a grand waste of time to me. Also, some of the prose is written in an unnecessarily flowery way making it a slow read where you are not even sure what he is talking about. I would have preferred to spend my time bouncing a ball off a wall.
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