French literature

“Sometimes it is as bitter to see an illusion destroyed as to witness the death of a friend.“

Will Maupassant get canceled? Why, you will ask astonished. Well, after all, this is a book about a woman’s life written by a man. But it is done so exquisitely and so accurately that one hopes the modern moral inquisitors will show mercy.

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant did spend a lot of time with women, mostly prostitutes, and his powers of observation must have been tremendous. He lived his short life intensely and without regrets, shunning traditional ways of living, avoiding the nightmares of society in the 19th century (which he often criticised in his books), only to die at 42 ravaged by syphilis, not before taking time to write his own epitaph: “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.”

*Maupassant by Nadar* (Gallica digital library)

Une Vie (A Life) was his first novel and literary success in 1883. First serialised in Gil Blas, a Parisian literary periodical, It was soon published in book form and became a phenomenon. Tolstoy called it the best French novel since Hugo’s Les Misérables.

There is really nothing much to say about the plot as there isn’t any. The book simply tells the life of Jeanne, a young aristocrat from Normandy. We follow her as she gets out of a convent she was sent to at the age of 12, returns to her beloved family home in the countryside, dreams and plans out her life she thinks promising and full of happiness, gets married to Julien, Count de Lamare, and settles down to a traditional way of life appropriate to her class.

What makes the story are the disillusions of Jeanne and the realism with which Maupassant depicts her life. It is not a simple coming-of-age tale. There is a whole indictment here: of a class, its educational methods, its traditions, its surprising naiveté. Jeanne, as many aristocrats then and now, is sheltered too efficiently from the realities of life and, thus, not prepared for tragedies and betrayals.

The shock of it all is so crude and overwhelming that she soon falls into a sort of depression she will carry around most of her life. Maupassant makes us witnesses and intimate spectators. It feels awkward at times, but the writing is so beautiful that we feel everything with her, we identify with many situations, we root for her (even if she is sometimes exasperating in her ways). What is most striking is how she perpetuates that condition by bringing up her son in the same manner, unaware that she is creating even more hardships. She can be cunning, but for all the wrong reasons.

Maupassant is keen to point out how the lower classes are more economically savvy and practical, how life teaches them. He also touches on religious matters in a very French way as when the beloved priest of the county teaches Jeanne how to revive her husband’s passion for her. The depictions of the Normandy region are mesmerising, it almost feels like being there in the flesh.

It is not a happy book, but it is not Zola either. The title suggest an epic narrative. It is really the story of a life not lived. There is a shadow of hope at the end, but will Jeanne finally decide on another path? She is a coward in many ways, but aren’t we all…

A life (Une Vie) by Guy de Maupassant
Oxford World’s Classics, UK, 2009
288 pages

A naturalist tragedy

“The critics greeted this book with a churlish and horrified outcry. Certain virtuous people, in newspapers no less virtuous, made a grimace of disgust as they picked it up with the tongs to throw it into the fire. Even the minor literary reviews, the ones that retail nightly the tittle-tattle from alcoves and private rooms, held their noses and talked of filth and stench. I am not complaining about this reception; on the contrary I am delighted to observe that my colleagues have such maidenly susceptibilities.”

This is what Zola wrote after the publication of his first literary success, Thérèse Raquin. He probably knew how the book would be greeted, as it is the first real example of literary naturalism, a new movement he instigated and promoted towards the end of the 19th century. Naturalism in literature followed realism, both rejecting romanticism but naturalism adding a dose of determinism and physiologic science (very popular at the time) to the empiricism of the realistic approach. Characters in a novel were to be put through an experiment and studied as phenomena, with every moral appreciation removed. As Zola would precise, he was most interested in their respective temperaments and how it determined their lives, a look at human nature that would enlighten and disturb his readers at the same time (human nature always interestingly compared with the animal world in many Zola’s books). That kind of writing is never easy or pleasant, and it is taken to extreme heights in Thérèse Raquin.

The story is simple. Thérèse is made an orphan when her father abandons her as a baby to his sister Mme Raquin. The good but very anxious woman raises her as her own, alongside her sickly son Camille. Thérèse’s nature is wild and free, but she is forced to live the life of her weakly cousin, always exaggeratedly pampered by Mme Raquin, even taking the same medicine as him. Not taking chances with possible intruders to their little circle, Mme Raquin marries Thérèse to Camille. Her son, spoiled and selfish, decides he wants an administrative career in Paris and the whole family leaves green Normandy to move to a dark and humid little passage near the banks of the Seine. Life is dull, repetitive, stifling, until Thérèse meets Camille’s sanguine friend Laurent. An affair develops, and a crime is planned and executed, flinging the two lovers into a merciless spiral towards folly.

I can safely say I have never read anything so raw and so disturbing. The atmosphere is claustrophobic and menacing. It is painful to read but at the same time hard to put down. The characters are all very selfish and exasperating, but mostly because Zola manages to create a good portrait (and critique) of the suffocating social conventions of the late 19th century, and a really good exposé on how environment (economic or natural) shapes human beings and their actions. Even if a lot has changed today, some of it remains valid. Of course, from a modern perspective, I’m not sure that life is as fatalistic as Zola and many of his contemporaries saw it, or that our humours and natures are so deterministic in our choices. But reading this book is uncomfortable because we do recognise parts of ourselves in Thérèse, in Laurent and Camille, or even in the cat François. It is chilling to the bone. Don’t read it if you are depressed. Also, crime doesn’t pay.

Thérèse Raquin by Emile Zola
Penguin Classics, UK, 2004
240 pages

Unpleasantnesses Galore

It is the season for mysteries, right? So I needed a mood pick-me-up after the depressing Thérèse Raquin. I turned to dear Dorothy again, and the 4th Peter Wimsey mystery, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. Published in 1928, it is a bit already above in quality compared to the 3rd book in the series, which I reviewed recently. It is moodier, trickier, more delicate, and most importantly, more plausible. Those who have read them all assure me that every instalment is an improvement on the other. So I’m really looking forward to slowly discover her work.

“Yes, and look at the corpses. Place always reminds me of that old thing in Punch, you know—‘Waiter, take away Lord Whatsisname, he’s been dead two days.’ Look at Old Ormsby there, snoring”

When old General Fentiman dies suddenly on Armistice Day at his club, the Bellona, it is not so much a shock as an unpleasantness. A veteran of the Crimean War, he was really lucky just to have lived such a long and fulfilled life, considering everything. Another member of the Bellona, our aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, still finds something odd with the old boy’s departure to the Almighty. All the more so as it seems the General had a very rich estranged old sister who died approximately at the same time, after both had finally met again and reconciled. The coincidence would simply be an emotional denouement if the old sister hadn’t left a very specific and annoying will. Who of the two died first? The answer to that question is half a million pounds. Wimsey and his Scotland Yard friend Parker are drawn into a merry-go-round of disappointed grandsons, efficient solicitors and butlers, and would-be chance heiresses of the artistic type. Astonishing discoveries follow each other until the rather unorthodox ending.

This book is not only about a mystery. It is a collection of people trying to avoid unpleasantnesses of all kind and is thus a great critique of British society in the 1920s. I love the way Sayers weaves social comment into the story: the difficult aftermath of WWI, the new position of women, the sometimes ridiculous provisions of British inheritance laws (a recurring theme), the class divisions. This is what really makes me like Sayers, the entertainment mixed with passages of great analyses disguised as matter of fact conversations and jabs. Lord Wimsey is now a more developed character. He is multifaceted, witty and even tender at times. A man who, despite his high position in life, never looses touch with reality and the vagaries of the human condition. Other characters are more rounded as well, with their strengths and weaknesses shown throughout, and with many allusions to their sexual lives, their psychological hardships, and sometimes their greediness and neediness.