Louis Lambert

Carolyn Fay
2007 Mar 25

Louis Lambert by Honoré de Balzac

The life story of mad genius Louis Lambert, as narrated by his closest friend. Lambert is fascinated with the invisible world, which he theorizes according to a mystical Swedenborgianism, influenced by the nineteenth-century “sciences” of animal magnetism and somnambulism. Balzac’s novel is intriguing: less as a philosophical text, but more as a narrative attempt to compose a biography from fragments of a life.

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Check out a print version:

(English) Balzac, Honoré de. Louis Lambert. Trans. Clara Bell and James Waring. Dodo Press, 2005.

(French) Balzac, Honoré de. Louis Lambert. La Comédie humaine. [The Human Comedy]. Ed. Pierre-Georges Castex. Vol. 11. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. 12 vols. 1976-81.