Au Soleil by Guy de Maupassant (1884)

This is a strange compendium in terms of content. Its main part is concerned with the author's travels in Algeria, but tucked away at the end are three things: a short story-sketch called At the Seashore about a typical French late nineteenth century gent taking a demi-mondaine along on a journey masquerading as his wife, for whom he falls (and she for him), but not quite enough not to let her go when they return to Paris; a long piece on travelling in Brittany; and a final short piece on a tour of the Creusot Ironworks, with strong, fiery, piston-pumping, hell-like imagery. These extras have nothing to do with the sun, rather they are reasonably often set in cool temperatures and cloudy conditions, so why they were incorporated in a volume of this name is anyone's guess. The best one would probably be proximity of production, this presumably being "the latest collection of Maupassant's works" at the time, despite the disparity of subject matter. Or perhaps they are included in this collected edition volume, but were not originally. Anyway, the dominating factor, slathered on in this instance, in the major part of the book on Algeria, is the author's stance. A seasoned Maupassant reader gets to know this well. It is a pulsing, intense stare at the darknesses and uglinesses in human character. It could be called a fascination with those aspects, undertowed by a one-eyed conviction that there is a kind of extra-reality about that vision - almost as though a more balanced view, incorporating a broader conception, is a traduction of that supremo-reality. Red-in-tooth-and-clawedness as the only real truth. The impression that one ultimately gets is of a kind of selective blindness, where the author feels dunderheaded and lacking in perspicacity. The implied insight and the paraded lack of it are occasionally very difficult bedfellows. The lifebuoy thrown out to the reader drowning is the stark intensity of that aforementioned stare; it can't but claim the attention. Thus the dirty, violent, immoral Arabs, the corrupt or stupid colonial officials, the universal criminality and, most of all, the suffocating, endlessly parching, interminable, ever-lonely, death-ridden heat have a species of compromised but compulsive muscle in their writing that keeps the dumb show going.