“What we want burns us up and what we can do destroys us; but knowing leaves our feeble constitution in a perpetual state of calm…I have placed my life not in the heart which breaks, nor in the senses which grow dull, but in the brain which does not wear out and which conquers everything.”

Imagine you are given a piece of skin that can grant your every desire, but shrinks every time it does so, eventually draining your life energy and killing you. What do you do? Burn out, focusing on hedonism and making ever more outlandish wishes? Make a few enormous wishes, hoping that will satiate you?

In The Wild Ass’s Skin, the protagonist, Raphael, finds that no wish can satisfy him, and that either option will inevitably lead to his death. Instead, he attempts to lead a life of total calm, shutting out the outside world so that he feels no desire for anything. In order to extend his life, he cripples it.

Regular readers of Balzac, used to his focus on realism, may be initially taken back by the introduction of magic, but in truth the story remains largely about the human condition. As usual, it is also rich, almost overwhelmingly so, with ideas, jokes, principles, infamous lines, and allusions. Jokes and puns are made by characters both intentionally and accidentally, sometimes not even noted by the others in the work and so left to the reader to decipher. It makes for a challenging style, but a rewarding one, with rapid fire dialogue and ripostes.

In the end, it is also a study of the limits to human imagination. Unlike Faust, who makes his deal and achieves much, Raphael, who could have any wish granted, wishes only for wealth – it seems not to occur to him to wish for anything else, until he realizes his life is in danger, and he wishes only for life, the one wish the skin will not grant. The book is a criticism of materialism, not just directly, but also in how it impoverishes the imagination.