Bel-Ami (Oxford World's Classics) - Softcover

Maupassant, Guy De

3.85

42,590 ratings by Goodreads

9780192836830: Bel-Ami (Oxford World's Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192836838 ISBN 13: 9780192836830

Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks, 2001

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'His rise testifies to the decline of a whole society.' Jean-Paul Sartre Maupassant's second novel, Bel-Ami (1885) is the story of a ruthlessly ambitious young man (Georges Duroy, christened 'Bel-Ami' by his female admirers) making it to the top in fin-de-si�cle Paris. It is a novel about money, sex, and power, set against the background of the politics of the French colonization of North Africa. It explores the dynamics of an urban society uncomfortably close to our own and is a devastating satire of the sleaziness of contemporary journalism. Bel-Ami enjoys the status of an authentic record of the apotheosis of bourgeois capitalism under the Third Republic. But the creative tension between its analysis of modern behaviour and its identifiably late nineteenth-century fabric is one of the reasons why Bel-Ami remains one of the finest French novels of its time, as well as being recognized as Maupassant's greatest achievement as a novelist.

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Review:

Bel-Ami . . .deserves a superior place in the canon . . .This book is as piquant as any contemporary satire. Don't take my word for it. Read it yourself. (Commentary, new Statesman, 04/06/01)

'...anyone proposing to study Bel-Ami in depth would do well to acquire the Oxford translation,given its excellent critical apparatus 'well-packaged and affordable' (MLR, 97.3)

About the Author:

Margaret Mauldon has previously translated Zola, L'Assommoir, Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma, Huysmans, Against Nature (winner of the 1999 Scott Moncrieff prize) and Constant, Adolphe for OWC. Robert Lethbridge has edited Zola's L'Assommoir and La Debacle for OWC and has written several books on Maupassant and Zola.

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