A story of love’s descriptive irrational power—think Proust’s ‘Swann in Love’…Like other great psychological novelists (Henry James was an admirer, as was Tolstoy), Maupassant proves a master at the slow sea change of human emotions, and even more their complexity…[Maupassant] turns an impassioned chronicle of destructive love into a very modern-seeming portrait of aging, friendship, and loss.You can practically hear the rustling of the ladies’ silks, or catch the sobs that are such a feature of the erotic lives of high society...And my God, is it sexy. This is a love in which intellect and emotion are at play at the same time. There is passion and there is calculation...Drink deeply of this intoxicating, heady work.
There are two main themes to this novel. The main plot is as follows: an artist is involved in a twelve year affair with a married woman. She became his mistress at a very young age, while the artist is certainly a decade or more older than she. As the time passes, the two fall into a relaxed relationship, now shorn of the heated sexuality with which it had begun. At this time the daughter of the mistress, who has been living with her grandmother, returns home. The artist, upon seeing her, finds that she resembles his mistress at the time their affair had begun. He is immediately seized with an ardent desire for the young woman - both emotionally and sexually. The second, underlying, theme now begins to arise. That is the problem of aging and not being able to exert the pleasing appearance of youth as well as the inability of reaching an intellectual understanding when the discrepancy of ages number in the decades.
This is a wise book, beautifully written, that relates the universal experience of both men and women throughout history and will continue until Man is no more. If I could give the book a sixth star, this one would deserve it.
About the Author
Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) was born in Normandy to a middle-class family that had adopted the noble “de” prefix only a generation earlier. An indifferent student, Maupassant enlisted in the army during the Franco-Prussian War—staying only long enough to acquire an intense dislike for all things military—and then went on to a career as a civil servant. His entrée into the literary world was eased by Gustave Flaubert, who had been a childhood playmate of his mother’s and who took the young man under his wing, introducing him into salon society. The bulk of Maupassant’s published works, including more than three hundred short stories and six novels, were written between 1880 and 1890, a period in which he also contributed to several Parisian daily newspapers. Among his best-known works are the novels Bel-Ami and Pierre and Jean and the fantastic tale Le Horla; above all, he is celebrated for his stories, which transformed and defined the genre for years. In 1892, after attempting suicide to escape the hallucinations and headaches brought on by syphilis, Maupassant was committed to an asylum. He died eighteen months later.
Richard Howard received a National Book Award for his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal and a Pulitzer Prize for Untitled Subjects, his third volume of poe
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