Underline Balzac

BarcelonaAs is already known, there are two types of readers, those of us who are still anchored to paper and those who have let themselves be seduced by new technologies. At the end of the summer, I heard someone praising the convenience of the e-book for going to the beach because it doesn't weigh anything, it doesn't get wet, it doesn't get damaged. I was shocked, theatricalizing my reaction a little: there is nothing I like more than that great novel I have read by the sea that ends up crumpled, the pages wavy and, when you go to put it on the shelf, a few grains of sand still fall to the ground.

In the group of traditional book readers there is a subdivision: those who treat the book as a sacred object and therefore do not mark it or fold the pages, and those of us who handle it with affection but without respect. There is nothing I like more than recovering a book inherited from my mother and finding underlined paragraphs or notes made in the margins. The book grows and takes on another dimension.

Recently I picked up The Abandoned Woman, by Balzac, in the edition recently published by the Petits Plaers collection, by Viena. I started it, as I almost always do, with a pencil in my hand and, just at the beginning of the novel, I underlined this sentence: “In the year 1822, in the first days of spring, the doctors of Paris sent to Lower Normandy a young man who was then suffering from an inflammatory disease caused by some excess of study, or perhaps of life”. We are off to a good start, I thought.

A little, very little later, I came across the sentence: “Except for some details, all small towns are alike”. I also underlined it and, while doing so, I remembered the well-known beginning of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. Who had read whom? I looked it up and confirmed that Balzac had written the sentence before Tolstoy published his Anna Karenina.From this point on, Balzac began to unfold a story of love, seduction, and social conventions with his unattainable narrative talent. I underlined again: “We are only ruthless with vulgar things, feelings, and adventures. When we attract gazes, we seem great”.

I think that here I finally let go of the yellow and black pencil, admitting that my abusive underlining made no sense. I continued to delight in the love story of Claire and Gaston and I only looked for the pencil again towards the end of the book, when she, in a letter addressed to her lover, writes to him: “Make me suffer, but do not deceive me”.