SOURCE: Robb, Graham. “Where to Begin the Feast?” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5016 (21 May 1999): 3–4.

In the following essay, Robb addresses the bicentennial of Honore de Balzac's birth and reviews three works that either directly or peripherally address his La Comédie humaine, including Butor's Improvisations.

For Balzac, birthdays were a waste of writing time—a day frittered away with the family—and a depressing reminder of how little he had achieved. On his thirty-eighth birthday, still in debt and with six novels overdue, he could see himself returning to his starting point: the garret near the Place de la Bastille where his writing career had begun in 1819. On his next birthday, he swore that by the time he turned forty, all his struggles would be over. Seven years later, the “Catalogue” of La Comédie humaine listed fifty-two titles of “works that have yet to be written.”

Having created...