Recommendations
Books Like Les Illusions perdues by Honoré de Balzac
Works that show how the market for cultural goods corrupts the values by which culture measures itself
Balzac's argument is that journalism, publishing, and theatrical criticism in the 1820s were systems for selling false values, and that genuine talent (Lucien has it) is therefore more dangerous to its possessor than mediocrity because it has more to be corrupted. These works share that same structural analysis of culture as a market.
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Buy on AmazonLe Père Goriot
by Honoré de Balzac
The Comédie humaine entry point — Goriot introduces Rastignac and Vautrin; Illusions perdues introduces Lucien and Vautrin in his second incarnation; reading Goriot first gives Vautrin his full history and makes his appearance in Illusions perdues more devastating
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Buy on AmazonSplendeurs et misères des courtisanes
by Honoré de Balzac
The direct sequel — Lucien's story continues under Vautrin's direction; Splendeurs is to Illusions perdues what a third act is to the first two; without the sequel Lucien's story is incomplete
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Buy on AmazonBel-Ami
by Guy de Maupassant
The Naturalist continuation — Maupassant's 1885 novel of Georges Duroy's rise through journalism and women is Illusions perdues thirty years later: the same journalism world, the same social ambition, but Duroy is deliberately cynical where Lucien was naively romantic
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Buy on AmazonLa Recherche du temps perdu
by Marcel Proust
The 20th-century heir that Proust himself acknowledged — Proust identified Illusions perdues as the greatest French novel and used its analysis of how social systems produce false cultural values as the organizing logic of the Recherche; reading both shows what Proust kept and what he transformed
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Buy on AmazonThe Aspern Papers
by Henry James
James's novella about the scholar who wants the great poet's papers is the Anglophone version of Balzac's literary-world analysis: the corruption of literary devotion by possessive desire is James's version of Balzac's journalism story
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Buy on AmazonBrideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
The 20th-century English parallel of ambition and fall in a culturally prestigious world — Waugh's Charles Ryder, the art student adopted into the Flyte family and eventually expelled from that world, inherits Lucien's structure without Balzac's political economy
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Buy on AmazonMoney
by Martin Amis
The 20th-century literary-world continuation — Amis's 1984 novel of John Self's destruction by the entertainment industry is Illusions perdues in a media-saturated world: the talented provincial who is consumed by the market he cannot understand
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Buy on AmazonThe Custom of the Country
by Edith Wharton
The American version of the Lucien story told from the woman's perspective — Undine Spragg's systematic conquest of New York and Paris society is Illusions perdues with the genders reversed: the calculating provincial in the metropolitan social world
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