In der dritten New-York-Review-of-Books-Ausgabe dieses Jahres schreibt Geoffrey O’Brien einen klugen Essay über Balzac. Er erläutert dabei auch seine eigenen Leseerfahrungen, die den meinen durchaus ähnlich sind:

Yet even after taking so much from those books I felt as if I were reading Balzac against the grain, wanting him to be a different sort of writer than he was, faulting him for long-windedness and digression, tuning out his extended riffs on animal magnetism or Swedenborgian doctrine and his monarchist political editorializing, reacting unhappily to what seemed abrupt or haphazard plot developments. I wanted him to hurry it along, tidy it up, bring it to a neat and emotionally satisfying conclusion; if possible I wanted to mainline the gist of what Balzac knew of the world without having to make my way through the ramifications of his paragraphs.

Meine Balzac-Notizen finden sich hier.