A Beleaguered City

Publisher Marketing: "A Beleaguered City: " A summary In brief: it is the story of the citizens of a town who are driven outside their walls when their dead invade their city and push them out. Although the story opens in summertime, within a very few pages natural world suddenly becomes wintry, the days short and bleak, the sky one in which we expect snow. The citizens are terrified by nothing but a deep sense of thousands of dead people who they once knew inhabiting their houses, streets, intimate spaces. The prelude tells of several incidents which show people no longer really believe in another world, or, at least don't act as if they do, incidents in which a few people explicitly argue that the new God is Money. The technique recalls Collins in that it is a series of narratives told by different people who are our reporters, each of whom experienced the incident differently given their character, perspective, tasks, sex, circumstances. The "feel" of the story, as I just said, reminds me of Camus's The Plague: the central narrator is the Mayor, a man who prides himself on his rationality. As we go deeper into the narratives, we find ourselves reading a visionary all the town always despised; the mayor's wife, a deeply emotional woman. The key incident for many in the town is they are made to feel the presence of some beloved person who has died. The visionary may have made love to a dead wife; the Mayor's wife saw a dead daughter's face; the dead leave curious tokens, ring bells, made uncanny noises. There is an atmosphere of suspended awe which is compelling; there are numbers of allusions to Dante's Commedia which made me think Oliphant was consciously creating in little a Victorian journey to that realm of the mind, imagination, myth, religion (what you will) that Dante did before her. Her Land of Darkness makes a similarly effective use of Dante's Inferno and Purgatio. One source of the power of Oliphant's ghost stories, their content, and themes is, as most biographers and critics agree, her crushing bad luck in losing a husband to TB, two sons before they reached 30, a nephew whom she brought up (died in India), and a daughter at age 12. She was like old lady Mary in that she adopted a girl; however, Mrs Oliphant left a will: ). She yearns to make contact again, and yet the whole idea of a world of the dead surrounding one is dreadful, one which can drive one mad. Her pictures of the afterlife and the afterworld are frightening, anything but consoling. There is no benign justice and no easy comfort in these stories. Contributor Bio:  Ballin, M G-Ph Honore de Balzac, ne Honore Balzac a Tours le 20 mai 1799 (1er prairial an VII du calendrier republicain), et mort a Paris le 18 aout 1850 (a 51ans), est un ecrivain francais. Romancier, dramaturge, critique litteraire, critique d'art, essayiste, journaliste et imprimeur, il a laisse l'une des plus imposantes uvres romanesques de la litterature francaise, avec plus de quatre-vingt-dix romans et nouvelles parus de 1829 a 1855, reunis sous le titre La Comedie humaine. A cela s'ajoutent Les Cent Contes drolatiques, ainsi que des romans de jeunesse publies sous des pseudonymes et quelque vingt-cinq uvres ebauchees. Il est un maitre du roman francais, dont il a aborde plusieurs genres, du roman philosophique avec Le Chef-d' uvre inconnu au roman fantastique avec La Peau de chagrin ou encore au roman poetique avec Le Lys dans la vallee. Il a surtout excelle dans la veine du realisme, avec notamment Le Pere Goriot et Eugenie Grandet, mais il s'agit d'un realisme visionnaire, que transcende la puissance de son imagination creatrice. Comme il l'explique dans son Avant-Propos a La Comedie humaine, il a pour projet d'identifier les Especes sociales de son epoque, tout comme Buffon avait identifie les especes zoologiques. Ayant decouvert par ses lectures de Walter Scott que le roman pouvait atteindre a une valeur philosophique, il veut explorer les differentes classes sociales et les individus qui les composent, afin d'ecrire l'histoire oubliee par tant d'historiens, celle des m urs et faire concurrence a l'etat civil. L'auteur decrit la montee du capitalisme et l'absorption par la bourgeoisie d'une noblesse incapable de s'adapter aux realites nouvelles. Interesse par les etres qui ont un destin, il cree des personnages plus grands que nature, au point qu'on a pu dire que, dans ses romans, chacun, meme les portieres, a du genie. Ses opinions politiques sont ambigues: s'il affiche des convictions legitimistes en pleine Monarchie de Juillet, il s'est auparavant declare liberal, et defendra les ouvriers en 1840 et en 1848, meme s'il ne leur accorde aucune place dans ses romans. Tout en professant des idees conservatrices, il a produit une uvre admiree par Marx et Engels, et qui invite par certains aspects a l'anarchisme et a la revolte.