Young, attractive and very ambitious, George Duroy, known to his friends as Bel-Ami, is offered a job as a journalist on La Vie francaise and soon makes a great success of his new career. But he also comes face to face with the realities of the corrupt society in which he lives – the sleazy colleagues, the manipulative mistresses and wily financiers – and swiftly learns to become an arch-seducer, … arch-seducer, blackmailer and social climber in a world where love is only a means to an end. Written when Maupassant was at the height of his powers, Bel-Ami is a novel of great frankness and cynicism, but it is also infused with the sheer joy of life – depicting the scenes and characters of Paris in the belle epoque with wit, sensitivity and humanity.
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I’d like to say I read this novel in its original French, but I enjoyed the translation. The story rolls along, and there are some well-observed glimpses into private moments that say a great deal. The brevity of life is a theme that threads throughout the book, and existential considerations act as a welcome foil to Bel-Ami’s selfishness and shallow obsessions with money and success.
Published in 1885 and translated into English in 1903, Bel Ami is one of those books that would have been sneered at as a “novel” (said with utmost disdain) when first released. It’s Maupassant’s second and one of his more popular works, especially after having been made into a less impressive movie (“The Private Affairs of Bel Ami”, 1947) with the witty, caustic George Sanders. (Don’t even bother with the 2012 movie.) This is one of those books that is so significantly better than the movie, there’s simply no comparison. They’re practically two totally different works.
A lot of times books from the early 20th century and before get a bad rap for being dry, too long, and told in excruciating detail. This is the rare one that is nothing like that. Sure, here and there Maupassant puts in details that would have been relevant at the time—historical details relevant to his newspaper job—but those are in the minority. Overall, this is a fast-paced and pretty shocking book for the period. It includes more details than would normally be given at that time about the main character’s relationships with women, and it’s very straight forward about them. Rare for 1885!
My favorite thing is the way Maupassant shows over the course of the book how the main character, George Duroy, changes drastically over time in a believable way. It’s the classic story of how more is never enough, and Duroy’s journey from pauper to powerful and rich is brilliantly told, never skipping over the risks he takes or how his mind changes from relatively naive to very cunning, from wishful to entitled.
I highly recommend this book!
A masterpiece. Reads as though it was written just 20-30 years ago, rather than in the 1880s.
It was a nice book. But there were times where I had to skim a few pages. It got a bit too detailed about georges day when nothing interesting was happening. I didn’t want to give up on the book though, thats why I kept reading and just skipping a few pages. The beginning was ok, then it was hard to keep going on until he ‘helped’ Mme Forestier going thru ‘a hard time’ – don’t want to spoil here.
After that, it’t ok to just skim the pages until a certain point where it get’s interesting again =))) and then I was astonished about georges way to get thru life and how clever and absurd at the same time he was.
I can imagine how popular this book has been after being published, but in this century now, where there are so many good books out there, it’s not an outstanding book for me. But I did enjoy it nonetheless.