Recommendations
Books Like Mont-Oriol
Best books to read after Mont-Oriol by Maupassant
Readers who respond to Mont-Oriol's satirical portrait of Third Republic speculation, its treatment of the spa as a social institution, and Maupassant's ambivalent comedy will find the wider tradition of French Naturalist social comedy.
- 1Buy
Bel-Ami
by Guy de Maupassant
Bel-Ami (1885) is the essential companion to Mont-Oriol: where Mont-Oriol shows the speculation and social comedy of a bourgeois resort, Bel-Ami shows the same energy of social manipulation and financial ambition in Parisian journalism — both novels are Maupassant's studies of the Third Republic's ruling mechanism of ambitious self-advancement.
- 2Buy
Au Bonheur des Dames
by Émile Zola
Zola's great department store novel is the most thorough treatment of the same commercial modernization that Mont-Oriol shows in miniature at the spa level: both novels show the transformation of a social institution (the spa, the small shop) into a capitalist enterprise, and both treat that transformation with ambivalence.
- 3Buy
La Curée
by Émile Zola
La Curée (1871) is the most powerful French Naturalist novel about property speculation of the Second Empire and Third Republic: Andermatt in Mont-Oriol is a smaller, more comic version of Saccard in La Curée — both are speculators who transform the natural landscape into commercial property for financial gain.
- 4Buy
The Newcomes
by William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's great novel of English society contains the same combination of social comedy and romantic disappointment that characterizes Mont-Oriol: both novels use a holiday or leisure setting to expose the social machinery of class and money that shapes romantic outcomes.
- 5Buy
L'Éducation sentimentale
by Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert's great novel uses the same technique of showing the romantic disappointment of an idealistic young man against the background of social and economic reality that Mont-Oriol uses at the spa: Paul Brétigny's abandonment of Christiane mirrors the larger pattern of Flaubert's Frédéric Moreau's failures.
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The Forsyte Saga
by John Galsworthy
Galsworthy's multi-novel saga about English property-owning classes is the most sustained treatment of the same connection between property, money, and romantic life that Mont-Oriol shows in miniature: the Forsytes and the Andermatt family are both studies of the bourgeois class that defines itself through its property.
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Une vie
by Guy de Maupassant
Une vie (1883) is the tragic female counterpart to Mont-Oriol's social comedy: where Christiane in Mont-Oriol suffers and recovers within the spa resort social world, Jeanne de Lamare in Une vie suffers and deteriorates within the Normandy provincial world — both novels show the same female vulnerability to male abandonment.
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Effi Briest
by Theodor Fontane
Fontane's great German novel (1895) is the closest European parallel to Mont-Oriol: both novels show the destruction of a young married woman through a summer love affair that the social world cannot accommodate, in a provincial or resort setting that temporarily suspends ordinary social rules.
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