In a grimy boardinghouse in a dismal Parisian neighborhood, Balzac sets the stage for his 1834 study of paternal love, greed, envy, and despair. Pere Goriot tells the story of a nineteenth-century counterpart to King Lear, a father so blindly devoted to his undeserving daughters that his tragic realization—'I loved them too much for them to love me at all'—comes too late. This best-known of Balzac's Comedie Humaine novels has all the stylistic elements one might expect: unnerving psychological analyses; vivid physical descriptions, acute observations of the rules governing Parisian society, disarming wit, and unbridled passion. Burton Raffel's translation is responsive to Balzac's style as well as to his words—nothing is suppressed, nothing obfuscated. The result is a highly readable, idiomatic translation of a master storyteller by a master translator.