Father Goriot

About the book

Eugène de Rastignac arrives in Paris with limited means and hopes of advancement, lodging among people whose circumstances conceal very different histories. The elderly Goriot's intense attachment to his daughters draws Eugène towards a world where affection and financial demand are difficult to separate. Vautrin offers another, more openly ruthless account of what success requires. As the student moves between the boarding house and fashionable society, he learns that apparently distinct worlds depend on the same exchanges of money, influence, and recognition. Balzac makes rooms, clothes, meals, and debts disclose the structure of those relationships. The novel's competing forms of education ask what ambition costs, especially when sympathy for another person's suffering encounters the promise of a more advantageous place in society.

• Social ambition
• Money and affection
• Moral education

Why read it

For a concentrated portrait of Paris in which a young man's ambitions meet both devoted love and an unsparing theory of success.

Novel · translated by Ellen Marriage