Recommendations
Books Like Père Goriot
Best books to read after Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
Père Goriot is the central novel of the Comédie Humaine — the work in which Balzac's vision of Paris as a battlefield where money has replaced blood as the organizing principle of social life is most concentrated and most devastating. If the novel's portrait of a city that destroys ordinary virtue and rewards ruthlessness moved you, these books share its concern with the social machinery of ambition, its interest in the relationship between money and human dignity, and its conviction that the modern world is organized around a competition whose rules most people only discover when they are already losing.
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Lost Illusions
by Honoré de Balzac
The most ambitious Comédie Humaine novel — Lucien de Rubempré's attempt to make his literary fortune in Paris; direct sequel to Père Goriot in following the fate of a young provincial in the capital, and one of the great portraits of the intersection of literary ambition, journalism, money, and social aspiration in nineteenth-century France
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The Red and the Black
by Stendhal
The essential companion from the French realist tradition — Julien Sorel's ascent through the same Restoration society Balzac portrays in Père Goriot; Stendhal and Balzac between them define the French realist tradition of the provincial young man conquering Paris, and reading both gives the full picture of what that tradition imagined
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Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's satirical novel about ambition and money in English society — the most important parallel in the English tradition to Balzac's vision of social competition as organized ruthlessness; where Balzac's Rastignac decides to beat Paris at its own game, Thackeray's Becky Sharp pursues the same strategy in London
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Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's novel about Pip's mysterious benefactor and his desire to become a gentleman — the most important English novel about the relationship between money and self-respect, which is the central concern of Père Goriot; Balzac and Dickens approach the same question from completely different temperamental directions
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Cousin Bette
by Honoré de Balzac
Balzac's late masterpiece and one of the most psychologically complex of the Comédie Humaine novels — the story of an older woman's revenge against her glamorous cousin and the family that has always taken her for granted; darker and more focused than Père Goriot, it is Balzac operating at maximum power
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The Way We Live Now
by Anthony Trollope
Trollope's satirical novel about the financier Augustus Melmotte's rise and fall in London society — the essential Victorian English parallel to Balzac's portrait of money as the organizing principle of social life; Trollope's vision is more sociological where Balzac's is more passionate, but both trace the same corrupting mechanism
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Germinal
by Émile Zola
The essential companion from the French naturalist tradition — the miners of Voreux and the social machinery that grinds them down; where Balzac traces the mechanics of ambition from above (Rastignac aspiring upward), Zola traces the mechanics of exploitation from below (Étienne Lantier trying not to fall further)
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Sentimental Education
by Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert's ironic anti-Balzac — Frédéric Moreau fails at everything Rastignac succeeds at; reading Père Goriot and Sentimental Education together gives the full range of what the French realist novel did with the story of the ambitious young man in Paris: the energetic success and the passive failure
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