Two Friends

By Guy de Maupassant

Book Overview

Maupassant is considered a father of the modern short story. Literary theorist Kornelije Kvas wrote that along "with Chekhov, Maupassant is the greatest master of the short story in world literature.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0886820030
• ISBN13: 9780886820039
• Release Date: July 1985
• Publisher: Creative Education
• Length: 32 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Age Range: 9 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 4 and higher

Customer Reviews

A whimsical story about the terrible consequences of whim.

'Two Friends' is one of the most sympathetic yet cruel stories Guy de Maupassant ever wrote. It is sympathetic in the portrait of the two heroes, a pair of idle bourgeoises who spend their Sundays fishing in Colombes, away, as one character says, from the boulevard, in perfect sympathy with each other. Such an idyll seems destroyed by the Franco-Prussian war, with Paris besieged, and the surrounding countryside deserted; but a chance meeting decides the somewhat inebriated friends on braving their pastoral in the midst of all the fear, hatred and carnage. The story is sympathetic in its portrait of nature, the sunset spectacle ominously bleeding the river; the vast empty paysage our fearful heroes cross, crouching behind vineyards. It is cruel in exposing the fragility of such bourgeois comfort and short-sightedness, which is really recklessness and desire; in the violent intrusion of war; in the clash between archetypal Frenchness (and the first half reads like a particularly sunny Raymond Queneau novel) and its feared opposite, the German; in the inevitable mechanics of a narrative that moves from the amiably inconsequential to the shocking. Maupassant's prose is as compellingly flat as ever, describing happiness and horror in the same uncluttered monotone.