Reviews for The Odd Number: Thirteen Tales by Guy de Maupassant

The average rating for The Odd Number: Thirteen Tales by Guy de Maupassant based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-07-31 00:00:00 Bryan Walker [every major character in it apparently dead by the end. The ending is successfully ambiguous though: it's unclear whether the son has actually hallucinated most of the story after the others have been killed, or whether it's only at the end that he begins to hallucinate (hide spoiler)]

Review # 2 was written on 2008-10-09 00:00:00 William Cushman Lovely prose. Complex and subtle. 2003 notebook: Rich, layered, similar theme throughout (the absent father, caught up with by the abandoned child, or the other way round). Draws on his medical experience, set around the world - India, Sri Lanka, Africa, U.S., Wales, and Sheffield even, glancingly; this is filled with a network of passing acquaintances, VSO, medics, journalists, scattered around. Joined by the bug. Cholera, disease, insects, diarrhoea feature. In the title story the narrator, a butterfly hunting grandfather is captured by cannibals, the first European thye've seen, thinking him magical with his magnifying glass that can start fires. These are incredible intergenerational, intercontinental, interdisciplinary stories, combining medicine, lepidoptery, love and the theory of evolution.