I finished Père Goriot, put down my phone, and found myself sitting with it for a long time.
Some readers come away most moved by the greatness and selflessness of the fatherly love in the novel. I can understand that completely. But while I was reading the first half, I kept feeling an odd resistance to this kind of absolute, unguarded devotion. I have felt something similar before when reading stories built on extreme forms of love or attachment. I know such feelings can be beautiful, even noble, and I truly admire them. Yet at the same time, they make me uneasy, as if I can smell tragedy before it arrives. Somewhere in my subconscious, there is already a warning: this will end badly, and there is nothing I can do about it. So all that remains is to watch, bit by bit, as those people are worn down—watch hopeful hearts get hurt again and again until they reach a cruel ending.
Balzac, especially in this translation, has a remarkably polished way with language. The novel is tragic from the outset. Its atmosphere is set early, and even the descriptions of scenery are steeped in dark tones, giving everything a decaying, withered feeling. But inside that overall gloom, there are flashes of wit that suddenly brighten the page. One line in particular nearly made me laugh out loud: “Thinking of this, she turned over in bed, as if deliberately displaying her fine figure, so that every morning the fat Sylvie would see a hollow left in the mattress.” It comes in the scene where Madame Vauquer is entertaining hopes of attaching herself to Goriot and is lying there making private calculations. That kind of mischievous touch is delightful precisely because it appears in such a bleak setting.
In the first half, there is actually not that much about Père Goriot himself. What struck me even more deeply was the portrait of the society around him. Men and women in high society pass their nights in endless amusement, debt, gambling, and intricate mutual manipulation, all while maintaining a surface politeness. It is a diseased social world, and the novel lays it out without mercy.
And yet, even in that noise and corruption, there are still traces of something good. The moment that moved me most was not in Parisian society at all, but in the letters from the young protagonist’s family, when he asks for money. His mother and two sisters offer him trust and support without reserve. Their words carry such warmth: a mother saying that she does not need volumes of explanation, that a single sentence is enough for her to understand, and that this alone can spare her the torment of anxious guessing; then her blessing him with fear, because she is a mother, but also with unwavering hope, because wherever he steps, their wishes and prayers go with him.
That scene immediately made me think of a mother’s letter in the preface to Stories of the Sahara. I no longer remember the exact wording, only the feeling of reading it late at night with tears in my eyes. At the time, I was thinking about how far I had gone for my undergraduate years, and how much that distance must have worried my parents. A parent’s love stretches across mountains and rivers: one end tied to me, the other to them. Every move I make tugs at that bond.
Then another memory surfaced. One summer after my sophomore year, I returned home and my mother came to pick me up at the train station. At first everything was normal. But once we got into the car, she suddenly started crying. I put my arm around her and had no idea what had happened. My father was driving in front and did not react at all. For a moment I thought something terrible must have happened at home. Only after a while did she explain: she was just so happy to have her son back. That kind of feeling is probably something I can only fully understand if I become a parent myself.
I was reminded too of another return home, after finishing an internship in Shenzhen. I had also just gone through a breakup and was in a very low mood. My parents came to the airport to meet me, knowing only a little about what had happened. I was worried they would be too concerned, that they would ask questions and force me back into things I did not want to relive. But what moved me was exactly the opposite. From the moment they picked me up, they never brought up anything that would make me uncomfortable. On the drive home, they chatted the way they always did when I came back from being away—ordinary family talk, light and easy. In the days after, they still did not raise the subject.
Writing this out, I suddenly wonder whether that resistance I mentioned earlier comes partly from experiences like these. When I get hurt, my parents are hurt too. I do not want my failure to take care of myself to wound them. And because of that, when I look at Père Goriot, I do not just see a great and admirable father. I also cannot bear to see him harmed.
He has already given everything to his two daughters, and still they cling to him like leeches, determined to drain the last drop from him before discarding him without pity. I feel the injustice of it; I resent it on his behalf; and yet, as a reader, I can do nothing. At times I even find myself angry with him for allowing it, though that anger is tangled up with sorrow. That may be one of the roots of my resistance: not simply fear of tragedy, but helplessness in the face of someone who keeps walking toward it out of love. Goriot’s long deathbed speech, almost operatic in its intensity—his accusations, his grief—was heartbreaking to read.
By the time I finished the novel, it seemed to me that its sharpest force lies not only in the story of one father, but in its condemnation of an entire society. This is a world in which fathers and daughters fail each other, sisters harbor resentments, and everyone treats another person’s suffering like a spectacle. Tragedy becomes little more than seasoning for lives otherwise dulled by boredom. It may stir the people involved, or those watching from the sidelines, for a moment. But by the next day, it is simply another “new” day.