A Life by Guy de Maupassant * *
It’s been awhile since I’ve read anything not written in this century, or the end of the last one. Growing up, I was quite taken with historical fiction, mainly Dumas . However, since then I’ve mostly focused on the problems of the modern man. I’ve decided to venture into the world of the classics to see if I’ve left them hastily, and realised I haven’t. While Maupassant ’s short novel was okay, I didn’t find it engaging for the present time. I purposefully didn’t read any analysis of this novel, because I wanted to draw my own conclusions. I did read the writer’s life though. Now, for all I know, I could be completely misunderstanding the text. However, a text always means what it means to you. No one can be in another real person’s head, just in that of their characters’. The story itself is quite simple. You can see what’s going to happen a mile away. It’s mostly about the life of a moderately wealthy French lower aristocrat woman. It starts the day her adult life begins, a...