Balzac's Omelette by Anka Muhlstein

Balzac's Omelette by Anka Muhlstein

'tell me where you eat, what you eat, and at what time you eat, and I will tell you who you are. This is the motto of Anka Muhlstein's erudite and witty audiobook about the ways food and the art of the table feature in Honore de Balzac's The Human Comedy.

Balzac uses them as a connecting thread in his novels, showing how food can evoke character, atmosphere, class, and social climbing more suggestively than money, appearances, and other more conventional trappings. Full of surprises and insights, Balzac's Omelet invites you to taste anew Balzac's genius as a writer and his deep understanding of the human condition, its ambitions, its flaws, and its cravings.

Anka Muhlstein was born in the city of Paris in the year 1935. Muhlstein's works include biographies of Queen Victoria, James de Rothschild, Cavelier de La Salle, and Astolphe de Custine, as well as studies of Catherine de Médicis, Marie de Médicis, and Anne of Austria, a double biography of Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart, and, most recently, Balzac's Omelette (Other Press). She has received two Académie française prizes, as well as the Goncourt Prize for Biography. Venice for Lovers is a book she and her husband, Louis Begley, wrote about Venice. They are residents of New York City.