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Contes fantastiques complets
MARABOUT Bibliothèque Fantastique n° 464 (1981) - Guy de MAUPASSANT Contes fantastiques
- GenresFrance
Paperback
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About the author
Guy de Maupassant
7,488 books3,048 followersHenri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a popular 19th-century French writer. He is one of the fathers of the modern short story. A protege of Flaubert, Maupassant's short stories are characterized by their economy of style and their efficient effortless dénouement. He also wrote six short novels. A number of his stories often denote the futility of war and the innocent civilians who get crushed in it - many are set during the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s.
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March 28, 2020
Hmm, am I the only person to review this edition? I found my copy in a Baltimore used bookstore in pretty ragged shape, so I assumed this was a more common version.
The stories don't do that much for me, though with stories of horror or the supernatural, so much depends on the anxieties and writing conventions of the time. Most of these stories have what strikes a modern reader steeped in English writing as an unnecessary exposition, wherein the real story begins after an introductory page where the narrator is introduced or explains why he's recounting the story. It's a bunch of strangers swapping strange stories at an inn, or it's a patient seeking the advice of a doctor, etc.
There are some interesting ones. I loved the one about Dr. Heraclius Gloss, the two versions of La Horla were fun, La Nuit was pretty spooky, l'Endormeuse was interesting.
But whether fair or not, some of the writing flourishes that were probably common at the time strike the eye of the modern reader as indulgent if not try-hard. For example, Maupassant is given to writing paragraphs where characters expound upon universal human characteristics, presumably setting the stage to help the reader sympathize with the feelings of the character.
I've seen this done to great effect at times in English writing to explain subtle feelings by analogy instead of exposition, something like "Everyone knows the panic of finding himself engaged in an argument while totally out of his depth; he searches himself frantically for a hidden store of rhetoric like a shopper in the checkout line digging into every pocket for a wallet that he knows he left at home." More often, though, Maupassant's analogies come off as dated or even untrue. I believe there was one where he was talking about the comforts of a well-liked piece of furniture, but like a desk or a bureau, not a chair, and I thought "I'm not sure I know what this feeling is."
But there are a few things I have to say: first, this set of stories contains some that were collected posthumously and some that were basically unedited drafts, and as such I don't necessarily conclude that Maupassant's writing is ineffective in general. It's pretty well understood that even excellent writers generate problematic first drafts, and considering how well certain stories do work, particularly for me the Dr. Heraclius Gloss story, I suspect that there is probably a lot of his work that I would enjoy even though the stories in this book missed much more often than they hit.
Second, I suspect that a lot of the accepted conventions of our day are going to seem in time as tedious as some of the conventions apparent in this book. For example, our marked determination to explain EVERY pregnant detail about a character, usually by way of expositional dialogue or a flashback. It only struck me recently how try-hard this device is when I watched The French Connection and the main character, "Popeye," is accused of having gotten other cops killed through bad judgment in the past. This is brought up by multiple characters by way of questioning the protagonist's competence, but the history of this detail and even of the name "Popeye" go unexplained. The detail of him having a nickname goes only to prove that he's been around for a long enough time to get one, and the story of the dead cops serves only to prove that he doesn't have much cachet with his bosses and the other cops. There's no need to waste time elaborating beyond that. Therefore, in evaluating books from different eras, I try not to be too dismissive over tropes that I find grating, but which were clearly accepted at the time.
One such trope that doesn't work with me is the tendency of the writer to have the protagonist explain what he's feeling or what's going on within him as a way of raising the tension. Part of this comes directly from the choice to use the 1st person in 90% of the narratives, a mode which is very out-of-fashion right now probably because it lends itself too much to the "mistake" of "telling, not showing." But then again, "Show, don't tell' has always been more wisely regarded as a general principle than a hard-and-fast rule, especially in stories which are essentially about phenomena and not about character. Of course it's lazy to just explain what the characters are feeling instead of writing effective details that move the reader, but sometimes the most direct path is through the mud and you've just got to let the reader know what's happening without being coy and, more often than not, heavy-handed about which books are lying on the desk of what's written on a character's shirt, etc. But I digress. Nevertheless, usually when done in this volume, with a character suddenly feeling a chill in their veins or feeling suddenly uneasy, I come off thinking, "Boy, I wish I had some inkling of why they would be feeling that way."
The two stars also goes for the edition itself. The binding is pretty poor with the words printed far to the inside of the page, so that you can hardly read the whole page without nearly ripping the book in half.
Recommended for Guy de Maupassant completists, but I would bet that the best stories of this collection also appear in tighter collections of stories that are focused on the best of his works, as opposed to broad surveys of certain types of his work.
The stories don't do that much for me, though with stories of horror or the supernatural, so much depends on the anxieties and writing conventions of the time. Most of these stories have what strikes a modern reader steeped in English writing as an unnecessary exposition, wherein the real story begins after an introductory page where the narrator is introduced or explains why he's recounting the story. It's a bunch of strangers swapping strange stories at an inn, or it's a patient seeking the advice of a doctor, etc.
There are some interesting ones. I loved the one about Dr. Heraclius Gloss, the two versions of La Horla were fun, La Nuit was pretty spooky, l'Endormeuse was interesting.
But whether fair or not, some of the writing flourishes that were probably common at the time strike the eye of the modern reader as indulgent if not try-hard. For example, Maupassant is given to writing paragraphs where characters expound upon universal human characteristics, presumably setting the stage to help the reader sympathize with the feelings of the character.
I've seen this done to great effect at times in English writing to explain subtle feelings by analogy instead of exposition, something like "Everyone knows the panic of finding himself engaged in an argument while totally out of his depth; he searches himself frantically for a hidden store of rhetoric like a shopper in the checkout line digging into every pocket for a wallet that he knows he left at home." More often, though, Maupassant's analogies come off as dated or even untrue. I believe there was one where he was talking about the comforts of a well-liked piece of furniture, but like a desk or a bureau, not a chair, and I thought "I'm not sure I know what this feeling is."
But there are a few things I have to say: first, this set of stories contains some that were collected posthumously and some that were basically unedited drafts, and as such I don't necessarily conclude that Maupassant's writing is ineffective in general. It's pretty well understood that even excellent writers generate problematic first drafts, and considering how well certain stories do work, particularly for me the Dr. Heraclius Gloss story, I suspect that there is probably a lot of his work that I would enjoy even though the stories in this book missed much more often than they hit.
Second, I suspect that a lot of the accepted conventions of our day are going to seem in time as tedious as some of the conventions apparent in this book. For example, our marked determination to explain EVERY pregnant detail about a character, usually by way of expositional dialogue or a flashback. It only struck me recently how try-hard this device is when I watched The French Connection and the main character, "Popeye," is accused of having gotten other cops killed through bad judgment in the past. This is brought up by multiple characters by way of questioning the protagonist's competence, but the history of this detail and even of the name "Popeye" go unexplained. The detail of him having a nickname goes only to prove that he's been around for a long enough time to get one, and the story of the dead cops serves only to prove that he doesn't have much cachet with his bosses and the other cops. There's no need to waste time elaborating beyond that. Therefore, in evaluating books from different eras, I try not to be too dismissive over tropes that I find grating, but which were clearly accepted at the time.
One such trope that doesn't work with me is the tendency of the writer to have the protagonist explain what he's feeling or what's going on within him as a way of raising the tension. Part of this comes directly from the choice to use the 1st person in 90% of the narratives, a mode which is very out-of-fashion right now probably because it lends itself too much to the "mistake" of "telling, not showing." But then again, "Show, don't tell' has always been more wisely regarded as a general principle than a hard-and-fast rule, especially in stories which are essentially about phenomena and not about character. Of course it's lazy to just explain what the characters are feeling instead of writing effective details that move the reader, but sometimes the most direct path is through the mud and you've just got to let the reader know what's happening without being coy and, more often than not, heavy-handed about which books are lying on the desk of what's written on a character's shirt, etc. But I digress. Nevertheless, usually when done in this volume, with a character suddenly feeling a chill in their veins or feeling suddenly uneasy, I come off thinking, "Boy, I wish I had some inkling of why they would be feeling that way."
The two stars also goes for the edition itself. The binding is pretty poor with the words printed far to the inside of the page, so that you can hardly read the whole page without nearly ripping the book in half.
Recommended for Guy de Maupassant completists, but I would bet that the best stories of this collection also appear in tighter collections of stories that are focused on the best of his works, as opposed to broad surveys of certain types of his work.
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