The Force of Destiny

Maupassant is extraordinary: the heroine is faced, throughout his life, in varying strengths events: death, murder, birth, betrayal, passion, pain .... and yet endeavoring to make us live it all through his eyes, he manages to make us believe that nothing happens!

Jeanne seems to have spent his life looking through a window a gray and rainy autumn wind that carries leaves, passions and hopes. His joy from start has continued to burn until extinguished altogether. To accentuate this, back in counterpoint and almost like a refrain more and more distant the memory of that light traveled in Corsica.

As always, in this author, style is fine, precise and concise. It almost does not analyze, he describes but has such a sense of the description that each character comes to draw with increasing sharpness. Sometimes very cruel way (the way is seen that poor Louison hurts), sometimes with a certain tenderness (Jeanne's father is very endearing). As for the husband, one hesitates between pity for her sad insignificance and anger for his abject selfishness: an attractive man for those who would cross it quickly, a "poor guy" for those who would experience good.

Often, one would shake Jeanne, wake, forcing her to take their destiny in hand, make mistress of herself, make her refuse to undergo. We even go so far as to wish him to take a lover. For at least live. Do forgotten that the story is set in a nineteenth century which stands Maupassant us some scathing tables with its attendant prejudices and proprieties, whatever the level at which social endeavors. Like any time for that matter. And environmental constraints come trim the few wishes that innocent Jeanne might have.

This novel plunges us into an indefinite and impersonal to believe in the banality of what makes live. The title is very telling. A life. No qualifier. A life how? A life of what? A life of that? Nothing. Just a life, with the quest for happiness that has stopped flowing into the hands unable to grasp the