Maupassant

I recently read some of Maupassant's short stories, a first venture for me.  The short story is very hard, and I think fails to give satisfaction more often than the novel (though not so often as poetry).  But when it achieves greatness, it is very compelling, it is like holding a jewel in your hands rather than admiring a fine view.  And yet the finest short stories grasp the world in little space, and capture time and the heart in a single twist of writing.  I am a great lover of short stories of all kinds, and they have the great practical advantage of readability when time or energy is lacking, and I am very happy to read the genre in many forms - crime, the (long) prose poem, the (short) novella, the fable, and the drama.

In the collection I read, the ones that stood out were Maupassant's flagship story, Boule de Suif, the savage  Mademoiselle Fifi, the odd and worried Miss Harriet, the philosophical Claire de Lune and the bizarre and unlikely, though very sad, Useless Beauty.  The themes seem varied, but they are all set in late nineteenth century France, often provincial, and often framed by the Franco-Prussian war, which bit into the French soul as the Vietnam War did into the USA's.  They are written with great distance, often taking the form of stories told by someone else, and they are characteristically unresolved, leaving many questions answered.

Well, I am hampered by my constitutional inability to read French, but I enjoyed them, but found them a little without passion.  I also found them utterly of one voice - so I rapidly became slightly bored at the emotional flatness, and the boredom and the bleakness.  But they are strongly written, and although they seemed to me entirely without frills or decoration, there are made of wrought iron - strong, graceful almost in spite of themselves, but without lightness, joy or esprit.  They are hammered out of words, and one has a real sense that the sentences have been worked at, again and again. I might read more Maupassant, but I'm not champing at the bit!

As any reader of this blog knows, the greatest short story writer of them all is Rudyard Kipling, but a close neighbour of Maupassant's on the shelf, Somerset Maugham, takes some beating too.  This is a form which doesn't get the attention it deserves, so I might make it a theme of a few postings over coming weeks. 

Comments

[Mrs Campbell]

Well, there's always Chekov. But having tried Maupassant you could try Balzac who wrote some short stories too - when are you off to Africa?

[glo]

I couldn't agree more about Maupassant! It is not very interesting indeed, unless you have a strong passion for rural Normandy. If you don't read more, you won't miss a lot.
You should eventually have a go with - and upgrade to - Stendhal, Zola or Flaubert instead, if you want to stick to 19th century writers. But you might also be willing to try some 20th century authors.