shawnwhy's review
5.0
Finally finished this thing after all these years, so very very dense with poetic description of fleeting moments , Flaubert train this guy really really well, the bit with Rodin is great. The writing is more exciting to me than Marcel's.
rows's review against another edition
Tolstoy may have been only a slight grump on this one. AH oscillates wildly from such gorgeous passages to such laugh-inducing ones. Consequently, my rating this wouldn't make any sense. So, I will instead demand appeals to my emotions and sympathies before all conversations. What's that? I left all the lights on? I'm not following. Oh, the lights feel unfulfilled without my presence? How awful! I suppose I'll return to, oh, whatever the heck I was doing then. Shucks, you know how it is, being so modern and a woman and all.
msand3's review
5.0
Maupassant’s final finished novel finds him at the height of his powers, writing about the sublime fear and thrill of love: the passions, joys, suffering, and pain -- all the irrational, compulsive actions and long, obsessive, self-reflective inner journeys that accompany love, break-up, rebound, and reunion. It’s quite an emotionally turbulent experience to read, appropriately mirroring the subject matter. Even before reading the introduction (which I always do after reading the novel), I suspected that Maupassant’s characters were all representative sides of a single psyche, perhaps even Maupassant’s own. I certainly found myself reflected in just about every character, from the tormented Mariolle, to the impossible to love and be loved Madame de Burne, to the cynical writer who disdains love (while always seeking it), and even to the servant girl who is the “rebound,” doomed to have Mariolle do to her precisely what was done to him by de Burne.
Besides the multifaceted character study, Maupassant delivers his usual gorgeous prose at the sentence level, including a symbolic section at Mont Saint-Michel, in which Mariolle and de Burne enter into their love affair while precariously walking along the edge of a precipice, signifying all the danger, excitement, foolishness, and sublimity of flourishing love.
This has instantly become one of my favorite novels of passion and heartache.
Besides the multifaceted character study, Maupassant delivers his usual gorgeous prose at the sentence level, including a symbolic section at Mont Saint-Michel, in which Mariolle and de Burne enter into their love affair while precariously walking along the edge of a precipice, signifying all the danger, excitement, foolishness, and sublimity of flourishing love.
This has instantly become one of my favorite novels of passion and heartache.
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