- Hardcover: 225 pages
- Publisher: Hyperion Pr (May 1977)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 088355576X
- ISBN-13: 978-0883555767
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"In general, he [Pearson] shows himself sensitive to the various registers that Maupassant employs, and manages to convey the wistful flavour of this story of a largely disappointing life." -- Robin Buss, TLS
"It is possible to smile at the consistently downbeat tone, while at the same time admiring this finely constructed, austerely written tale." -- Robin Buss, TLS --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
"It is possible to smile at the consistently downbeat tone, while at the same time admiring this finely constructed, austerely written tale." -- Robin Buss, TLS --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
`every heart imagines itself the first to thrill to a myriad sensations which once stirred the hearts of the earliest creatures and which will again stir the hearts of the last men and women to walk the earth' What is a life? How shall a storyteller conceive a life? What if art means pattern and life has none? How, then, can any story be true to life? These are some of the questions which inform the first of Maupassant's six novels, A Life (Une Vie) (1883) in which he sought to parody and expose the folly of romantic illusion. An unflinching presentation of a woman's life of failure and disappointments, where fulfilment and happiness might have been expected, A Life recounts Jeanne de Lamare's gradual lapse into a state of disillusion. With its intricate network of parallels and oppositions, A Life reflects the influence of Flaubert in its attention to form and its coherent structure. It also expresses Maupassant's characteristic naturalistic vision in which the satire of bourgeois manners, the representation of the aristocracy in pathological decline, the undermining of human individuality and ideals, and the study of deterioration and disintegration, all play a role. But above all Maupassant brings to his first novel the short story writer's genius for a focused tension between stasis and change, and A Life is one of his most compelling portraits of dispossession and powerlessness.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
A Tale of Haute Normandie,
This review is from: A Life: The Humble Truth (Paperback)
What are the secrets, most carefully concealed, of those with whom we share a life? What are the limits and depths of our ignorance and naiveté? When the final twilight falls and disdains to tarry, what will be left to see us through? Upon what can we pour out the last of our days? These are but a few of the cavernous questions which yawn ahead with a reading of this book. The heroine is likeable to a fault, yet even as we like her'and we do so to the end'we begin to wonder if she's really quite all there. Can she have done nothing to prevent some of the horrors which assail? Is she the innocent victim of those who decide her fate and have made her what she is? Perhaps, strange to say, the most endearing of characters in this novel is the family estate where most of the action occurs. Perched upon a cliff near Yport, in the Pays de Caux of Haute Normandie, it gazes out over the sea in fair weather and foul, loved by its inhabitants, yet much disserviced in the end. Still, it knows tenacity and moderation and its place. If only those it shelters could take a lesson from its lines, from its silent sense of measure, from its order and repose.
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