I had never heard of Guy de Maupassant when I walked into an old-timey room in Los Angeles’ the Last Bookstore. But I was determined to leave with one of the nondescript, aged books that lined the shelves of that charming little room. So I scoured the shelves, looking past outdated encyclopedias and ship’s logs until I found what I only later realized was the first of several volumes of the French writer’s work translated into English. I don’t plan on finding the others; that wasn’t the point, and what was in this tome satisfied my curiosity more than enough.
Une Vie is Maupassant’s debut novel; it details the life of a woman of minor nobility from the time she leaves convent school to the time she retires to the countryside. It is filled with disillusionment, betrayal, and the morose details of an unfulfilled, monotonous life. For all that, its characters maintain nuanced roles in the life of the protagonist. Even her worst betrayers bring color to her world in one phase or another of their relationships. But as the story moves along, the world seems more decayed and the protagonist’s place in it more precarious and questionable; until finally it ends with just one kind ray of hope, and with the wonderful line, “Life, after all, is not as good or as bad as we believe it to be.” This line may be less clumsy in the original French. Regardless, on a memetic level it is a wonderful bowtie to the story which precedes it.
Beyond Une Vie, this volume contains a number of short stories written by Maupassant. Through the novel, and all these shorts, are a lot of sexist notions about the emotional frailty of women. Maupassant, in many ways, comes off as very much of his time. However, female characters are also allowed to be agents with full personhood, so in this way his writing is sadly less misogynistic than much of contemporary writing. There is a passage in the short story A Vagabond which seems to be dancing around a description of rape, which implies the victim was only angry about her spilt milk and not the titular vagabond’s violent violation; this work is potentially damning, but as someone who does not often read translated nineteenth century works, I did not feel sure I had interpreted the passage accurately.
Maupassant captures a lot of mundane lived experience in his work. As someone who prefers speculative fiction, this does not always speak to me. But I do appreciate his attention to detail and consistency in character writing. The unexpected conclusions to many of his short stories was refreshing. In particular, those of All Over, In the Wood, and Martine delighted me. If you have an interest in this period of writing and are comfortable reading about mere humans rather than heroes, then Maupassant’s work might indeed be for you.
Content warning: murder, rape, domestic abuse, infidelity, gaslighting, other implied sexual content
Plot: 6
Characters: 7
Themes: 9
Prose: 7
Overall score: 1883.
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