1850 - 1893… In the personality of Maupassant and by extension in his literary figure, there is something of a stark contradiction between a growth away from the figure of his father and his conversion into the same paternal stereotype of a misogynistic type.
His vital circumstances, marked by the death of his brother and the separation from his parents, led him towards a fatalistic introspection that fit perfectly with a naturalistic trend determined to undress miseries with that naturalness understood as the rottenness of the soul amidst the narrowness of customs and customs. the rules.
El naturalism prevailing in its creative age, as a current capitalized by Zola, found in Maupassant another pillar in its most pessimistic aspect and at the same time more lucid in that fateful assumption of the author himself by painting the abominable sensation of existing in a world stripped of the recent brilliance of romanticism.
But assuming that contradictory aspect of the Maupassant in debt to his unhappy childhood, we also find in his stories narratives devoted to the fantastic, to a Gothic setting inherited from Poe.
So reading Maupassant is today an introduction to the chronicle closest to the earth in his most extensive first narrative or a foray into the depths of the soul in naturalistic stories in the background but with romantic overtones in the background. All this perfectly accompanying a strange end of the XNUMXth century, already subjected to the alienating dictates of an industrial society at the dawn of the first great leap to capitalism.
Top 3 recommended books by Guy de Maupassant
Tallow ball and other stories
For a server, who has always liked the fantastic more than hyper-realism, finding that volume was a revaluation of a Maupassant on which other labels of greater narrative sobriety were marked.
Published for the first time around 1880, the story that heads this compendium invites us to a very unique journey for some characters who leave a conflict zone in France in 1870. In their flight, they soon find their particular scapegoat on the than to focus your anger and sadness.
Ball of tallow is a woman faced with the journey like an odyssey of human pettiness. And everything that happens on that trip ends up pointing to the worst of what we can become, to the renunciation of principles for survival and the ability to overcome the worst sins with the slightest hypocrisy ...
The main story is accompanied by up to 10 more stories (The Tellier house, Mademoiselle Fifi, The tombs, The 29th bed, Patience's friend, That pig from Morin, A day in the country, Uncle Boniface's crime, The necklace and The old man ), stories of less substance but that, like a good dressing, accompany well.
Vendetta and other horror stories
If we talk about stories in which death has an exuberant presence, we soon recall the Poe already mentioned above. And the truth is that Maupassant is far from being Poe and nevertheless concentrates the same plot background.
The melancholy of one or another author explodes into sinister, decadent arguments. The violence of death in any of its manifestations takes here the vigorous body of the certainty of our human nature and confronts it with imposed bravery.
In the end, the connecting link between one and the other is the insane notion of our limited time, with the monsters of the imagination of one or another author occupying their souls to be reflected in stories as distant as they are close, like opposite poles of magnets for oneself. conception of life.
Bel Ami
At times it seems as if this story was written as a contrast to Dumas's great romantic work, The Count of Monte Cristo.
There is something of deep revenge with a guy who turns his will and his ambition into a lyrical revenge, as is the case with the Count. Because in this story we find the despicable Georges Duroy, who came from the colonies to the French metropolis. And little by little we discover a guy capable of everything for the most indecent growth.
Hero of the most evil spirits and the most perverse wills. One of the first great antagonists made successful, Cynical and Stoic in equal measure, George will sell his soul every moment to the devil of the most destructive temptations just to follow his path to the glory of vanity.
