Nothing really prepared me of reading Bel-Ami even after having watched the movie starring Robbie Pattinson and Uma Thurman. To be honest, I never really had the intention of reading it for a while, but the story in the movie was engaging — this mediocre, no-good, no-talent, above-average looking bloke who sleeps his way up the Paris society and somehow managed to pull it off, but not before a lot of learning pains and eating a few humble pies.
It is a novel that I couldn’t put my finger on, because it is deceivingly simple in its writing, but expansive in the coverage of its themes; it is a book that thrives in the grey of moral ambiguity which makes you question why you are rooting for this vile anti-hero? Nothing is as simple as it looks in Bel-Ami and you can go into the rabbit hole of its side characters who arguably have more depth than our title character. But at the same time, it is a wonderful novel because of the reasons above.