Product Description
Emma Bovary is a bored housewife who indulges her romantic fantasies with a series of adulterous affairs. Charged with obscenity when first published, the novel became a literary scandal and a bestseller.

• A concise introduction that gives the reader important background information

• A chronology of the author's life and work

• A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context

• An outline of key themes and plot points to guide the reader's own interpretations

• Detailed explanatory notes

• Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work

• Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction

• A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Good book but..
This is a good book and looks good formatted on the Kindle.The problem is the links to the footnotes and endnotes don't work.Since this is a translated piece this makes it highly inconvient to read in this formatt, unless Amazon fixes the links.I have been in contact with them on this, but they have not responded. ... Read more

Product Description
Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" is the classic tale of its title character, Emma Bovary, the wife of a doctor, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of her everyday life. Heralded as a seminal work of Realism, "Madame Bovary" is considered by many as one of the greatest novels ever written. Attacked for obscenity when it first appeared in Paris in 1856, "Madame Bovary" was an instant success for the author. His quest for literary perfectionism can be seen in this work, his masterpiece, as his craft for writing is greatly exemplified. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A classic everyone should read!
This is one of a few classics of our time. When it was first published in 1857 it was consider a public scandal. Read en enjoy! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Bouvard and Pecuchet & the Dictionary of Accepted Ideas
Brilliant. Prescient. Hilarious. Flaubert in the full flower of genius. That it was unfinished would not be evident if you weren't told. A must read for anyone. The two characters,Bouvard and Pecuchet, get a lot of money,buy books on wildly diverse subjects, read them and are convinced they are now experts. They put their new found 'expertise' to work in the real world and succeed in making a mess of everything around them- in the funniest ways imaginable. But they are not daunted by their failures. No, they do the same thing again while expecting different results. They seem to personify the trend that had its beginning around Flaubert's time and has grown into the internet with everyone his or her own expert. Filled with information but no knowledge. The Dictionary reads as true now as it did then-"see Paris and die." Profoundly funny.

Masterpiece of Comedy
As Flaubert aged, his books become broader comedy and this is the limit.Two petit French beurocrats, as indistinquishable as Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, take early retirement in the country and decide to study all human knowledge.In Madame Bovary, traveling libraries add to the central figure's pretension and lead to her tragic downfall.Here, simply, the older and mellower Flaubert presents endless comedy -- and while Flaubert did not finish the book, doubtless it could only continue in the same vein.Mediocrity of mind and spirit cannot be cured by simply pouring in "facts" or trivial, amateurish experience, the reader is told, by one example after the next, and never by preaching as in Tolstoy.And Bouvard and Pecuchet have no teachers -- only the audacity to assume that all worth knowing is simply open to them by the act of reading.In any event, the real end of the book was finished -- "the dictionary of accepted ideas" -- which to these uninspired clowns seems the summit of all human wisdom.

Will droll, and vastly understated, the humor is only the more scathing when finally revealed, often in a scene reminiscent of Chaplin or silent comedy.Encountering this Flaubert masterpiece is greatly helped by a dead on translation that is pithy and precise, worthily replicating Flaubert's famous search for "the right word" in all his books.Even the drollest, plainest sentences resonate with humor -- never, incidentally, hateful or spiteful, but just sadly wise.

Odd but interesting book
Flaubert supposedly read something like 1000 books to do the research for this noveland apparently had an almost photographic memory. Bouvard and Pecuchet proceed to plow through the entire corpus of human knowledge, ostensibly to become more learned and true Renaissance men, now that they are men of leisure.

You'd think this would seem a laudable goal for a French intellectual like Flaubert, but he seems to be make fun of such superficial or perhaps self-educated learning, and perhaps of human knowledge in general. Flaubert seems to presage the 20th century's weariness with arid and purely ivory-tower scholarship that perhaps has led to the anti-science sentiments we see today, the rise of fuzzy-minded, muddy, and fallacious philosophies like New Age, and perhaps even movements like Creationism's antipathy toward evolution and Darwin.

Perhaps to Flaubert, since there is no end to learning, and all human knowledge, or at least an individual human's learning is finite, there are no real truths and all knowledge is essentially relative and inconstant and incomplete. Certainly Bouvard and Pecuchet's projects are always doomed to failure and are never completed.

I'm not sure what else in the way of profound meaning I can glean from this book, but it does seem to sound a cautionary warning or perhaps cynical note on the dangers of superficial learning or perhaps even too much learning. Perhaps Flaubert is also saying life is not something to observe and analyze, but to experience instead. That would be consistent with the beliefs of the Realists, since the French Realist authors like him pioneered the idea of intensively observing and researching the common people and the dregs of society that they often wrote about, as in Zola's Nana, for example, who was a prostitute.

Sharp satire, fuzzy edition
Bouvard and Pecuchet is one of the funniest books ever written, and remains every bit as telling in its attack on bourgeoise society as when it was first published.The "Dictionary of Received Ideas," which is included in this edition, is sort of a "Devil's Dictionary" of middle-class stupidities; astonishingly, almost all of its satirical bite still holds true.I dock this Penguin edition one star because it doesn't have any notes, which would have made Flaubert's nineteenth-century context far more easily graspable.

Angry that I had to give it even one star
"Longwinded.Tedious. Impossible to finish (there was a reason Flaubert never finished this either). ... Read more

Product Description
At once a classic of travel literature and a penetrating portrait of a 'sensibility on tour', Flaubert in Egypt wonderfully captures the young writer's impressions during his 1849 voyages. Using diaries, letters, travel notes, and the evidence of Flaubert's travelling companion, Maxime Du Camp, Francis Steegmuller reconstructs his journey through the bazaars and brothels of Cairo and down the Nile to the Red Sea. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

One of the best "travel books" I have read
In 1849, at age 28, Gustave Flaubert (who had not yet distinguished himself in literature) embarked on a trip to the "Orient", as it was then called.His traveling companion was Maxime Du Camp.From November 1849 to July 1850 they were in Egypt.From there they went on to Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Italy.This book is an account of the Egyptian portion of the trip.

FLAUBERT IN EGYPT actually is a composite, assembled from several sources:Flaubert's own travel notes, in their original version and as later re-written by Flaubert (but never published); letters Flaubert sent from Egypt to his beloved mother and to his good friend Louis Bouilhet; and the papers and several publications of Du Camp.Francis Steegmuller has done a brilliant job of selecting, inter-weaving, and translating these various extracts, and then interpolating them with helpful and non-intrusive notes and commentary, so that the result is a very coherent and eminently readable travelogue.

True to its title, the book reveals as much about Gustave Flaubert as it does about Egypt, and to me they are equally engrossing and fascinating.Egypt of 1850 was an extraordinary and exotic place, and Gustave Flaubert was an extraordinary sojourner, highly receptive to the exotica of Egypt.His writing, as translated and edited by Steegmuller, is more literary, readable, and entertaining than that of Sir Richard Francis Burton, who began his famous travels and accounts a few years later, in the 1850s.

FLAUBERT IN EGYPT abounds with the odd, the colorful, the curious, and the grotesque.One example: Flaubert and Du Camp spent five hours perched on a wall watching the ceremony of the Doseh, whereby a sheik (priest) rides his horse over the bodies of more than 200 men, lying on the ground and arranged and pressed together in a row like sardines.According to legend, in so doing the sheik cannot hurt any of the men; if they die, "it is due to their sins."Another:Sailing up the Nile, they passed a Coptic monastery, from which dozens of monks, totally naked, spilled into the river and swam towards their boat shouting "Baksheesh, baksheesh", while the crew of the boat tried to beat them off.Elsewhere, Flaubert writes that baksheesh and the cudgel "are the essence of the Arab."The essence, or symbol, of Egypt turns out to be bird[poop]. Actually, Flaubert, as translated, uses a more vulgar term:"Bird[poop] is Nature's protest in Egypt; she decorates monuments with it instead of with lichen or moss."

As the above suggests, the strait-laced and the politically-correct of today may find offense in some passages of FLAUBERT IN EGYPT.There is much that is vulgar, and a few of Flaubert's observations would quickly be condemned by some as racist.He also described, and participated in, rather exotic venery.Of one night with an "almeh" (dancer/whore), during which he counted "coup" five times, he wrote:"How flattering it would be to one's pride if at the moment of leaving you were sure that you left a memory behind, that she would think of you more than of the others who have been there, that you would remain in her heart!"Be that as it may, Flaubert himself left Egypt with a venereal problem for which he received mercury treatments for the rest of his life.

Steegmuller gently pushes the notion that the expedition and the travel notes Flaubert maintained during it marked an important transition in his writing and aesthetic perspective from romanticism to realism.Along those lines, one of the excerpts from Du Camp's writings tells about Flaubert, on the summit of Gebel Abusir overlooking the Second Cataract of the Nile, suddenly crying out, "I have found it! Eureka! Eureka! I will call her Emma Bovary!"

More on Flaubert than Egypt
This book's value lies largely in the insight into the personality of Flaubert that it provides.The commentary on ancient Egypt is virtually nil. Flaubert's commentary on the Egypt of 1849 is rather interesting, but limited here as well.I was looking for more on ancient Egypt out of this book, but Flaubertistas may not be disappointed. There are a few photos and drawings of interest.

"Traveling Makes One Modest"
Having enjoyed "Salammbo," which is a technicolor sandals and swords Panavision epic a century before its time, I wondered about Flaubert's earlier travels in the fall of 1849 in the desert realm. He probably behaved no differently than any other twenty-seven-year-old aesthete from Europe among the natives, and this remains less an indictment of "orientalism" in our P.C.-sensitive era than a pair of journals by him and his companion Maxime du Camp, with commentary by the Flaubert expert Francis Steegmuller. Parts ramble on without a lot of interest, and other sections captivate you, but like any diary and the expanded journal entries made later by Flaubert, the work as a whole is more a miscellaneous notebook of impressions and observations, much as one might expect of this formidably articulate tourist.

I think the relatively few sexual episodes get, if understandably for their candor, too much of the attention here compared to the bulk of this slender book, which is given over to the sights. There's amidst the itinerary and dutifully recorded letters to his mother many marvelous descriptions. Not all were addressed to his mother! You get the sense of the languid pace of a brothel, an early visitor's curious wanderings among the colossal statues of Luxor or Thebes, the sun rising over the graffitied Pyramids, his first sight of the Sphinx-- Steegmuller's notes remind us how magical this would have been before the ubiquitous photographs-- and the decaying splendors of Karnak.

Here's a sample of the prose about this last attraction. "The first impression of Karnak is of a land of giants. The stone grilles still existing in the windows give the scale of these formidable beings. As you walk among the forest of tall columns you ask yourself whether men weren't served up whole on skewers, like larks. In the first courtyard, after the two great pylons as you come from the Nile, there is a fallen column all of whose segments are in order, despite the crash, exactly as would a fallen pile of checkers. We return via the avenue of sphinxes: not one has his head-- all decapitated. White vultures with yellow bills are flying around a mound, around a carcass; to the right three have alighted and calmly watch us pass. An Arab trots swiftly on his dromedary." (169)

Out of such awesome silence, Flaubert also gained inspiration for "Madame Bovary," unlikely as it may seem. He also learned early about the fickleness of women, no matter where they might live, in his closing comments to Louise Colet about an "almeh," a lady of the night who often entertained him, Kuchuk: "You and I are thinking of her, but she is certainly not thinking of us. We are weaving an aesthetic around her, whereas this particular very interesting tourist who was vouchsafed the honours of her couch has vanished from her memory completely, like many others. Ah! Traveling makes one modest-- you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world." (220)

These remarks remind us that Flaubert cannot be seen as a mere pawn of mid 19-c imperial strategems. He took advantage of his position, but he also realizes his complicity and the whole game that he by his privilege is able to indulge himself in as long as he pays the price. Another will always be found to accept his payment and render services accordingly, Those who denigrate Flaubert's typically frank account for its coolly documented exchanges might well contemplate how we today are enmeshed in a far greater contest, that began in such initial encounters, a century and a half before the vogue of globalization.

Thoroughly orientalist, of course
"Let me begin by giving you a great hug, holding my breath as long as possible, so that as I exhale onto this paper your spirit will be next to me."

This is the book I read the most. I read it at random, sometimes rereading passages I read only days ago. It's not the exoticism that allures but the colonial/imperial mind at work comprehending and quantizing the East. Read Said's Orientalism to better understand the situation under which these journals and letters were written. Flaubert cuts through Egypt like a shark, almost in on his own joke. Initially he seems to take a typically orientalist posture scandalizing the sexuality of the savages. Upon further investigation one can see that his tone is ambivalent yet cooly giddy at the thought of westerners being perturbed at such behaviour. It's almost as if he knows that the West is the oddball out and everyone else is normal.

an example of Orientalism and racism, and its effect on Western perception of the East.....
I was required to read Flaubert's account of his travels in Egypt, when I was in my senior year of college.We were doing an extensive study on the effects of the mentality of "us" versus "them."A prime example was in the travels, made by Europeans, to the East, as well as to other countries that became colonized parts of North and South America.Though, many people consider this a classic novel (hence, it is one of Penguin Classics' "classic" pieces of literature).

I found Flaubert's observations of Egypt to be pretentious, arrogant, chauvinistic and offensive.His approach was one of several ignorant examples demonstrated amongst other Europeans, who went on to colonize countries, as part of a movement of rescue and possession.As we read of his numerous sexual exploits with the local women, his responses (often of distaste) to the local customs, and his general air of boredom, he epitomizes the example of a bored, rather spoiled man-child, with nothing better to do but objectify and criticize the customs of a culture foreign to his own. ... Read more

Product Description
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Emma Bovary hat den Kopf voller romantischer Träume. Wie langweilig muß ihr dagegen ihr Leben als Frau eines Arztes in einer Provinzstadt erscheinen! Ihr Mann Charles versteht ihre Wünsche und Nöte nicht. So sucht die leidenschaftliche junge Frau ihr Glück in fremden Armen - und wird bitter enttäuscht.
1. eBook-Auflage im April 2005. 2. Auflage im Mai 2010. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Dated Period Piece or Classic Tragedy?
Depending on your perspective, this book is hopelessly dated and has little relevance to today, is an important step forward in the French novel, or is a classic depiction of tragedy in the Greek tradition. You should decide which perspective is most meaningful to you in determining whether you should read the book or not.

The story of the younger Madame Bovary (her mother-in-law is the other) is presented in the context of people whose illusions exceed their reality. Eventually, reality catches up with them. In the case of Emma Bovary, these illusions are mostly tied up in the notion that romantic relationships will make life wonderful and that love conquers all. She meets a young doctor of limited potential and marries with little thought. Soon, she finds him unbearable. The only time she is happy is when the two attend a ball at a chateaux put on by some of the nobility (the beautiful people of that time). She has a crisis of spirit and becomes depressed. To help, he moves to another town where life may be better for her. She has a daughter, but takes no interest in her. Other men attract her, and she falls for each one who pays attention to her in a romantic style. Clearly, she is in love with romance. Adultery is not rewarded, and she has a breakdown when one lover leaves her. Recovering, she takes on a younger lover she can dominate. This, too, works badly and she becomes reckless in her pursuit of pleasure. In the process, she takes to being reckless in other ways and brings financial ruin to herself and her family. The book ends in tragedy.

Here is the case for this being dated and irrelevant for today. A modern woman would usually not be trapped in such a way. She would separate from or divorce the husband she grew to detest, and make a new life. She would be able to earn a decent living, and would not be discouraged from raising a child alone. So the story would probably not happen now. In addition, the psychological aspects of her dilemma would be portrayed in terms of an inner struggle reflecting our knowledge today of psychology, rather than as a visual struggle followed mostly by a camera lens in this novel. The third difference is that the shallow stultifying people exalted by the society would be of little interest today. You find few novels about boring people in small towns in rural areas.

The case for the book as important in French literature is varied. The writing is very fine, and will continue to attract those who love the French language forever. This is a rare novel for its day in that it focused on a heroine who was neither noble by class nor noble in spirit. The book clearly makes more of an exploration into psychology than all but a few earlier French novels. The story itself was a shocking one in its day, for its focus on immoral behavior and the author's failure to overtly condemn that behavior. Emma pays the price, as Hollywood would require, but there is no sermonizing against her. So this book is a breakthrough in the modern novel in its shift in focus and tone to a personal pedestrian level.

From a third perspective, this book is a modern update of the classic Green tragedy in which all-too human characters struggle against a remorseless fate and are destroyed in the process. But we see their humanity and are moved by it. Emma's character is a hopeless romantic is established early. To be a hopeless romantic in a world where no one else she meets is condemns her to disappointment. She also seems to have some form of mental illness that makes it hard for her to deal with setbacks. But her optimism that somehow things will work out makes her appealing to us, and makes us wish for her success. When she does not succeed, we grieve with her family. Flaubert makes many references to fate in the novel, so it seems likely that this reading was intended.

My own view is that the modern reader who is not a scholar of French literature can only enjoy this book from the third perspective. If you do, there are many subtle ironies relative to the times and places in the novel that you will appreciate, as well. The ultimate ascendence of the careful, unimaginative pharmacist provides many of these. The ultimate fate of Madame Bovary's daughter, Berthe, is another. Be sure to look for these ironies among the details of these prosaic lives. The book positively teems with them.

If you are interested in perspectives two or three, I suggest you read and savor this fine classic. If you want something that keeps pace with modern times, manners, mores and knowledge, avoid this book!

If you do decide to read Madame Bovary, after you are done be sure to consider in what elements of your life you are filled with illusions that do not correspond to reality. We all have vague hopes that "when" we have "it" (whatever "it" is), life will be perfect. These illusions are often doomed to be shattered. Let your joy come from the seeking of worthy goals, instead! What worthy goals speak deeply into your heart and mind? In this way, you can overcome the misconceptions that stall your personal progress. ... Read more

Product Description
This collection of three tales, "A Simple Heart," "Saint Julian," and "Herodias" offers an excellent introduction to the work of one of the world's greatest novelists. In settings as familiar to the author as Normandy or as distant as biblical Palestine, these three stories reveal a writer skilled in narrative concentration and intensity of focus. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (12)

Eh
Three Tales is not a classic in the sense that it profoundly influenced writers for generations and somehow still manages blow away readers today. It is not, in other words, Madame Bovary. When you read that Flaubert allegedly got so emotionally involved in writing about Emma's fate that he threw up, you'd believe it.

These stories don't generate that kind of reaction. In truth, if these did not have the name Gustave Flaubert on the cover, I would have never guessed it. In looking at the other reviews, it seems like readers tend to find the stories uneven though they don't agree on which is best. My sense is that this is something to check out of the library: The price is steep since it's barely a hundred pages long and it's not going to leave you gobsmacked.

The first story -- `A Simple Heart' -- is about a character who is taken for granted by others. This falls into a problem that hits all but the best realism. If it fails to completely blow away the reader, then it starts to feel like "This happened. . . and then that happened. . ." The main thing I got out of it is background for when I some day read Julian Barnes's novel Flaubert's Parrot.

The second story, about St. Julian, has serious potential. It starts off like a twisted medieval fairy tale take on Oedipus the King. And the main character has a love of killing -- obsession, really -- that makes him fascinating in a disturbing way. But the story ultimately becomes unsatisfactory because it becomes unpredictable in a bad sense: the psychology of the main character is never really explained, so whatever he does is unanticipated.

The third story, about John the Baptist, requires having the details of the story at the front of your memory to really appreciate. There's a serious onslaught of names and the endnotes aren't really enough (and the level of detail waffles between overkill and none at all, which doesn't help things). This story got more and more interesting as I was able to orient myself. . . and then it was over. I think if it had been longer, I would have really gotten into it. The main effect of reading it is to put Flaubert's Salambo on my reading list. It always sounded to me like a novelty piece that wouldn't be worth the time. In seeing how Flaubert writes about Antiquity, I'm reconsidering.

Biblical References
I was surprised at the number of biblical references in these stories though I probably shouldn't have been given Flaubert's time and place.He lived in a Catholic country during a religious era.I've read lots of contemporaneous Victorian fiction and though the Brits throw in many bible tie Flaubert out does them.In `A Simple Heart' Felicite is goodness incarnate seeking only to love without seeming to need anything more than an other for which to care.She'll even settle for inanimate objects as long as they evoke someone or something.`St. Julien' was harder for me to enjoy.Apparently in order for him to become a saint he had to first be very, very bad.After enough blood is splashed about he realizes how wrong he's been and becomes good through loving someone `despicable'.My favorite story of the three was `Herodias'.The Middle East of John the Baptist and his nemesis Salome's time was just as tumultuous as today.The story felt immediate and alive.

Three Tales is a trio of short story gems by the peerless Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) published Three Tales in a magazine in 1877. Flaubert was already a rich and famous author. The meticulous master had already produced "Madame Bovary" and "A Sentimental Education" ensuring his elevated place in the annals of literary greatness. The three short stories in this tiny book are memorable, moving and beautifully rendered in classic Flaubertian simple, poetic and realistic prose.
A Simple Heart is the first and best of the tales. It tells the sad story of Felicite. She is an illiterate and religious orphan who grows up in northern France. She works hard on a farm where she is beaten by her master; has a sad and short love affair and becomes a maid in the home of an austere and cold widow. Her happiest days are taking care of Paul and Virginia the two children of the widow who has hired her to work in her small home.
Her nephew dies while in the French navy breaking her heart. Her happiest moments are spent in the company of Loulou a big green parrot she is given by a friend. When the great parrot dies he is stuffed and kept in Felicite's modest room.Felicite befriends the poor and old. She becomes deaf and dies with a vision of her parrot Loulou as an incarnation of the Holy Spirit. Felicite is a portrait of a good human being and Loulou is the most famous parrot in all literature. This is a wonderful little story of Christian faith put into action by a kind woman. One of my favorite all time short stories.

St. Julian Hospitator is a story reminiscent of a fairy tale. Julian grows up rich and coddled by his parents in a castle. He is a sadistic hunter who enjoys killing thousands of animals. This part of the story was very disturbing to me as an animal lover. By a tragic mistake he kills his own parents. This murder had been predicted by a large elk whose family had been brutally slain by Julian. He spends his life in remorse serving as a soldier and later a beggar. He also serves as a boatman who delivers travellers across a dangerous body of water. One night he cares for a leper giving him shelter, food and drink. The leper is transformed into Jesus Christ as Julian is forgiven and taken to heaven. The story was inspired by a stained glass window portraying Julian which was located in Rouen one half mile from Flaubert's boyhood home.

Herodias is the final story. It tells the story of Herod Antipas who married his brother Phillip's wife Herodias. Herod Antipas is the tetrarch of Galilee who rules from the fortress Machareus. He gives in to the desire of his sexy stepdaughter Salome's wish to have the head of John the Baptist on a platter if she will dance for him. Flaubert has done his homework and describes in detail life in first century Israel. The most memorable character who is John the Baptist who condemns the hedonistic and cruel Herod. John proclaims the coming of Jesus Christ the Messiah and Lord of Life.

These three short stories by Flaubert are excellent and well served in this handsome Penguin edition!

A wonderful collection of stories by Flaubert
Flaubert's collection of "Three Tales" brings together a wonderful set of short stories. Working from contemporary to ancient and in various modes of realism, Flaubert delves into the spiritual depths of his characters. The first story, "A Simple Heart" is the best of the group. In this story, Flaubert tells the story Felicite, a loyal servant to an uninteresting patron. Flaubert quickly covers her whole life, from her difficult childhood and through her many attachments to her death. Felicite is a woman who feels love deeply, but Flaubert's presentation is very detached and never maudlin. The last great love of Felicite's life is a parrot (which also inspired Julian Barnes' "Flaubert's Parrot") who comes to symbolize the holy spirit for her. It would have been easy for Flaubert to portray Felicite's simplicity as an object of scorn or irony, but he treats her faithfully and never passes judgment on her actions or thoughts. Her story is beautifully told and stands up well to any short story I know.

The second tale, "The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller," is a retelling of the legendary Saint's life. Flaubert is in a completely different mode here; he is comfortable in the quick and magical progression typical of medieval tales. Flaubert's eye for detail makes some of the scenes more horrific and as such more effective. In particular, the scenes of carnage while hunting and the scene with the leper are particularly well drawn.

The final tale, "Herodias," is a retelling of the story of John the Baptist's execution. Here, Flaubert delves into the emotions of religious fervor and political intrigue. He focuses not on Herodias or John, but on Herod. He portrays Herod as caught between competing forces: Rome and the tribes outside his kingdom; his wife and the proconsul; pharisees, essenes, and the fledgling movement spawned by Jesus. All of these competing voices make the story a bit disjointed at times, but once again Flaubert's realism lends a detached feel to the entire story.

Margaret Drabble's introduction to the volume is useful in how she ties the "Three Tales" into Flaubert's career and surroundings. The cathedral at Rouen, for example, has a series of stained glass windows depicting Saint Julian's story, and it also has a statue of the beheading of John the Baptist. Such details help bring the stories into greater clarity, though I recommend reading the introduction last if you have never read the stories, so as to be able to come to the stories fresh.

ACQUIRINGPIETY
N.B. THIS REVIEW REFERENCES ST. JULIAN AND A SIMPLE SOUL ONLY.

The role of the Catholic Church in the daily lives of 19th century French provides the underlying basis for the characterizations in these two Contes.Whether high-born or lowly, Flaubert's two disparate protagonists are deeply influenced in their actions and attitudes by their faith. Making no moral judgment on their response to Christianity the author simply depicts their spiritualdevelopment as extensions of the Church, which permits readers of various religious backgrounds to draw their own conclusions.

THE LEGEND opens with elaborate exposition of the family's
grandiose castle. Divided into three titled chapters (CURSE, CRIME, REPARATION) this tale was inspired by the story depicted in the stained glass windows, which impressed the author in his boyhood. Wealthy, pampered only-son Julian graduates from torturing small animals to a frenzied obsession with all manner of hunting: when wild game eludes him, he seeks out human prey to satisfy his bloodlust.But he must fulfill several, contradictory prophecies in his lifetime, before the final apotheosis of his twisted soul.He chooses to make the ultimate sacrifice in atonement for a lifetime of savagery.This legend explains why Julian became the patron saint of ferrymen and innkeepers.

The second short story features a humble woman (ironically named Felicity--happiness) who proves the antithetical protagonist. In five chapters (FELICITY, THE HEROINE, DEATH, THE BIRD, THE VISION)Flaubert offers a grimly pessimist view of life in a coastal village. Rarely acting upon her own initiative this poor old "simple soul" is ignored by most, mistreated by her family, unappreciated by her mistress, and barely noticed by the villagers.Her generous nature gradually increases in piety, culminating in a confused Vision which--if nothing else--grants her a few moments of celestial bliss before extinction of her mortal but unremarkable life. Flaubert's purpose in this depressing tale is oblique; refraining from direct social and religious commentary, he is content to paint the canvas, allowing viewers their private interpretation.Felicite acted as a mother by proxy, denied a fully dimensional life of her own; perhaps her personal view of heaven's reception proved bizarrely "true."

... Read more

Product Description
General Books publication date: 2009Original publication date: 1904Notes: This is an OCR reprint of the original rare book. There may be typos or missing text and there are no illustrations.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (31)

Lord knows the world does not await my 5 star review of this classic..
Yes, yes, I'm sure Mr. Flaubert will do quite fine without this review. What do I have to add? Not much. But, I do want to say that this novel captures the passage of time better than any other novel I have read.
I read the Penguin edition. I cannot tell you how the translation stacks up. I picked it out for the pretty cover and the way the pages laid flat when I read it. I used to always choose Penguin editions, but I fear the type is too small for my eyes now.

I agree this is an unreadable translation.
After plodding through 50 pages, I sampled another tanslation at the library and realized that it was not Flaubert, but the un-named translator responsible for the awkward, unreadable sentences. Was this translated by a computer?

Less perfect than Madame Bovary, yet even more magnificent.Though flawed, Penguin's edition is the best available.
As none of Flaubert's other works are as widely known as Madame Bovary, I assumed they must be inferior, and did not rush to read them.When I finally started reading Sentimental Education, I was immediately struck by its relative lack of refinement, and I almost put it down.I am quite glad I did not: it has become my favorite literary work of all time.

Unfortunately, there isn't a single adjective I can use to describe its magnificence, and I certainly would not say it is "greater" than Madame Bovary.It takes minimal interest in doing the things that are generally considered important; for example, there is not a single articulable "idea" presented in the novel.The action reaches a climax near the end, but it is rather arbitrary, and even feels forced.There is a central metaphor, I suppose, but not the sort of puzzle-piece metaphor one would find in Tolstoy's work.

And yet, I feel the rejection of the conventions of "great" literature are greatly to Flaubert's credit.In Sentimental Education, Flaubert directly accomplishes those things that literary conventions were developed to accomplish.To provide an incomplete list of those things, he establishes an intimate and emotional connection with the reader, illustrates a number of the fundamental properties of the world we live in, and provides that aesthetic bliss found only in masterful art.

As further evidence of this novel's awesomeness that I couldn't fit into a properly organized paragraph, this is the only book I've ever had dreams about, and indeed I continue to have dreams about it.According to the introduction, Kafka also had dreams about it.

REGARDING THE Penguin Classics EDITION SPECIFICALLY:
There are a few stray stupidities with this edition, but I think it is probably the best available.I compared portions of the translation to the original French, and it is certainly more faithful than the Oxford edition.The chapter-by-chapter timeline and the corresponding historical timeline are very useful and efficient.The introduction is interesting and relevant, and even contains a polite spoiler warning.

My biggest objection is the glaring abridgment of the novel's title.The full title is "L'Education Sentimentale: Histoire d'un Jeune Homme."The latter portion of the title comes into play when, on page 192, a character makes direct allusion to it, saying that he will "write a little novel entitled A History of the Idea of Justice."Readers of the Penguin edition are at risk of entirely missing this allusion.

Another objection is that no character list is presented, as the characters are introduced confusingly and and so great in number that, if the reader isn't keeping a list him/herself, he/she will entirely lose track of them.Finally, there are a few words that are not translated, and no note is given on their meaning.Some are used commonly by English speakers, but one or two I was never able to figure out the meaning of.

That said, this novel is highly recommended, and the Penguin edition is the best available.

Another wretched "translation".
This is a truly abominable translation (i.e. the OXFORD edition tr. by Parmee). It is awkward, inaccurate and full of inappropriate Briticisms.It includes such phrases as "pop off for a toddy" and Ay, guv!"The new Wall revision of the Baldick translation (Penguin) is not much better, also full of Briticisms and anachronistic colloquialisms. Why do they do this? It borders on racist jingoism. I once read a British review of a translation of MADAME BOVARY which complained that it still retained "a whiff of French" about it. What could possibly be more repugnant when reading Flaubert?

I recommend the Signet edition translated by Perdita Burlingame. It is unfortunately out of print. This masterpiece is in desperate need of a respectful and readable translation.Signet should at the very least reprint their edition.

Frederic is one fabulous man.Regrettably, virtuous women are always within yards of the like of him.
Set during French Revolution in 1848, this novel is about the gallivanting life of Frederic Moreau. On board a ship to Nogent he catches sight of Marie Arnoux.This is the beginning of Frederic's sentimental excursion from quixotic to almost neurotic.As the ocean sways the vessel, the glimpse of this beautiful woman disways him from his agenda in coming to Paris.After he finds out she is married, he befriends the husband Jacques to be close to "Her".The belle-epoque of Paris consumes the life of aspiring lawyer.He muddles his life up by engaging in frivolous women and expenses.Apart from all these, Frederic is romantic and a great companion to his lovers.On one of his brief affairs he describes his happiness as "so natural, so indissolubly linked to his own life and to the person of this woman, that he had no doubt he'd be happy for the rest of his days."He abandons her the next day.

Although I give it only three stars, I am still fond of Flaubert.This book is just not his first rate.
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Product Description
The Shelf2Life Drama Collection is an engaging set of original pre-1923 one-act and full-length plays.From stories of endearing protagonists aching for love in the American heartland to vindictive antagonists stirring up trouble with relatives, these plays offer compelling dialog and amusing twists.The characters, costumes, dialects and set-designs described in these pages highlight a new era of plays - focused on creating relationships and environments that audiences could connect with.The Shelf2Life Drama Collection invites readers to discover a heart-warming comedy or gut-wrenching tragedy from this period of realism. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

AMetatext
This is a work that should not be neglected by those interested inFlaubert or by lovers of French Literature. It's format resembles anold-fashioned cyclorama, which was basically a revolving canvas, portrayingvarious interpretive images to an audience that would be seated in themiddle of a room. Or it may recall the same period's "magiclantern" which would produce a similar effect, projecting a series ofimages on a flat wall, the precursor of modern cinema.

Flaubert usheredin an entirely new sensibility to the world of letters. He reinvented theconcept of the literary artist as word-and world shaper. The word is theworld and vice-versa. No writer ever engaged in such a Herculean struggleto shape every word, every sentence, every image, every assonance orconsonance to perfectly conform to his intention.

Flaubert engaged ina kind of ascetisism his entire adult life, which is hardly news, but iscentral to an understanding of this work and to his attraction towards St.Anthony for a protagonist. Flaubert was for many years a kind of hermit inhis study at Croisset, where he retired to his study to read books andwrite novels. He had contact with his mother and adopted niece and wroteletters to a mistress (Louise Collet, and later to George Sand) along witha few male friends. He would make brief sojourns into Paris, but for themost part, stayed to himself in his provincial hideaway. What he dreamt ofthere, besides his most famous works (Madame Bovary and L'EducationSentimentale) were reveries such as this novel and Salammbo, another bookset in the Near-East and equally evocative in terms of his treatment ofthatregion's sensual and Byzantine richness.

"TheTemptation" sparkles with some of Flaubert's most carefully andlovingly constructed imagery. It is the author's own homage to thefertility of his imagination. He never fathered a child literally that weknow of, but this work and Salammbo were his ways of saying that he wasfertile in all other respects. Each passing personage or creature is a seedsewn by this father of imagery.

One of the most senseless andill-informed utterances in the annals of criticism is Proust's comment thatFlaubert never created one memorable metaphor. Flaubert's entire cannon isone vast metaphor. They are evident in every sentence and every passage ofevery novel he ever wrote. This is particularly true in this work, as anyinformed reader will no doubt conclude after reading it.

One otherarea of recommendation extends to students of Gnosticism. Flaubertencapsulates much of the central theories of the early Gnostic Fathers andApostles in a few well-delineated characterisations and brush strokes. Iwould also recommend the Penguin edition, edited and translated by KittyMrosovsky, for her introduction and notes. The only drawback I have withher is that she portrays Henry James as denigrating Flaubert's work, wherein fact he generally effusively praises it. To those who can read it in itsoriginal text, I can only say I envy you and wish I were there.

Read this book!
This is a startling and brilliant piece of prose poetry that deserves to be more widely read; just don't expect anything like his more conventional novels.Indeed, don't read it expecting a novel at all; it reads more likea cross between modernist poetry and Medieval vision literature.

A work of interest to the Flaubert aficionado
This work is likely to challenge those readers used to Flaubert's more representative works, i.e. Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, "A Simple Heart."The difficulty lies not in novelty.The Temptation of Saint Anthony harkens back to the morality drama "Everyman" and Erasmus' In Praise of Folly.History notables, mythical personages, and personified qualities appear.Saint Anthony converses with the Queen of Sheba, Apollonius, Buddha, Isis, Venus, the Devil, and the Sphinx.Other characters are simply titled "A Child", "The Old Man", "The Stranger", and so on.These and others occur in a narrative structure that in print resembles the layout of a play.This mode lends itself to Flaubert's ambition to expunge the author's present from the work in the way Yeat's Byzantine dancer is indistinguishable from the dance.As Ms. Mrosovsky says in her lucid and comprehensive introduction Flaubert was so armored of this work he revised it several times during his career.She makes a case for The Temptation to be considered a significant part of the Flaubertian cannon.Most academicians, however, do not agree with this assessment as evidenced by the fact Madame Bovary is easy to come by more than a century after the author's death and The Temptation is not.The exquisite descriptive passages plus the profundities Flaubert attributes to the characters are not enough to endow this book with the dramatic tension and irony a reader finds in his better known works.This is not to relegate the book to obscurity.An encounter with Saint Anthony brings a reader to a fuller appreciation of the master's stringent art illustrated by his more famous novels. ... Read more

Product Description
This Halcyon Classics ebook collection contains Gustave Flaubert's (1821-1880) most influential writings, including his first published novel and masterpiece, MADAME BOVARY.

MADAME BOVARY is the story of an upper middle-class French doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.

This ebook is DRM free and includes an active table of contents for easy navigation.

Note: This revised third edition has been compiled to address problems with earlier editions of MADAME BOVARY.

Contents:

Madame Bovary
Bouvard and Pécuchet
Salammbo
The Temptation of St. Anthony
Herodias
The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller
A Simple Soul
The Dance of Death
Over Strand and Field
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Product Description
The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Letters, French; Biography ... Read more

Product Description
Gustave Flaubert's classic novel
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Customer Reviews (3)

Bouvard and Pecuchet (Kindle edition)
Bouvard and Pecuchet by Gustave Flaubert. Published by MobileReference (mobi).

Bouvard and Pecuchet is one of the funniest books ever written, and remains every bit as telling in its attack on bourgeoise society as when it was first published.

The worst book I've ever read.
This book is merely list after list after list after list of the state of knowledge in various fields at the time Flaubert was alive. If Flaubert wasn't a very famous writer, it would not be called a novel. It isn't a novel. Its an unedited scrapheap. Read it if you must real all of Flaubert for bragging rights, or because of OCD. Otherwise, run as if it were the plague. Its that bad.

Flaubert's brilliant unfinished novel in an excellent new edition
Flaubert's brilliant, and incomplete, final work (he died without completing its final couple of chapters, which exist only in outline form) has been long overdue for a new translation, and new packaging. While earlier versions always made the work look musty, the new Dalkey Press release looks great (although my cover is different from the one pictured above) with a new translation by Mark Polizzotti (author of a good biography of Andre Breton, pope of surrealism) and a reprint of an earlier preface by Raymond Queneau, as well as an appendix including "Dictionary of Accepted Ideas" and "Catalogue of Fashionable Ideas."
Flaubert's work always hovered somewhere between realism and modernism, which made him the literary equivalent of the Impressionist painters, and in his last work he goes the furthest in the direction of modernism, so much so that one is struck almost immediately by the affinities between this work and the later absurdist literature of Beckett and Kafka. Kafka always spoke of Flaubert in tones of veneration, and his admiration is nowhere clearer, at least for me, than in Bouvard and Pécuchet.
Flaubert's work remains as thrillingly modern as, say, the paintings of Manet, and it deserves to be re-discovered and celebrated.From its seemingly inhospitable soil has grown some of the greatest riches of twentieth century literature. ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Important and great novel, Less than mediocre translation
Remember the last time you rode in an old car with bad shocks? Well, that is how this translation reads.
Parmee's introduction is full of promise; he identifies the main problem in the translation of Flaubert,
Proust's "Man of the Imperfect." There is no real imperfect tense in English, so one must substitute. Parmee
identifies several ways to do this,and ends with the use of the present participle, either as part of a verb
sequence, adjectivally, or as a gerund. The first is not encouraged by English stylists and grammarians.
Despite Parmee's many choices, he sticks to those that involve the present participle, especially as a tense.
Since this will not carry him very far, he switches tenses mid-paragraph, even mid-sentence! Thus he violates one of the most basic principles of English composition, viz. consistency of verb tense. This is what makes the ride bumpy. Bad English, suitable only for dialogue or dialect.
Further, it is not clear what kind of British he writes, it varies from Oxbridge to semi-American.
It was so important to Flaubert that style and meaning are harmonious and create an integrity that is poetic,
that this translation is a miserable flop.Cynthia C. Kegel, Ph.D.

DREADFUL Translation - go for Penguin Edition
SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION is one of the glories of literature.While its context seems more dated than that in MADAME BOVARY, its language has the engaging richness of Flaubert in full glory.Knowing it and loving it, I decided it was time to reread it.Trusting to the word "Oxford," I bought and began this edition.Poor Flaubert must truly be spinning: this version is studded with the very sort of cliches that would have been anathema to him.After suffering through several of them, when I read that "his grand passion for Madame Arnoux was beginning to peter out", my patience for this version "petered out."I jettisoned this copy and ordered the also available PENGUIN CLASSIC edition with translation by Robert Baldick.I strongly urge you to select the Penguin rather than the Oxford World's version.

Wanting it all
Frederic Moureau is a young man who wants it all... he wants the great romantic life, the social commitment, the financial success, the respect from everyone. This is the perfect example of what a novel is, if we are to accept Lukacs definition of it as the epic of the ages with no gods. There is nothing in this young man's life that gives a sense of totality to his world... there are many ways to be followed, but none to actually enclose in itself the sense of the eternal horizon of time. As he meets Mme. Arnoux, one could think, by the way he thinks about her, that she is going to be his entire world, but she is not... a few moments later we find him completely devoted to the cause of his friends, and later, to his physical involvement with a woman of doubtfull reputation... etc, etc. Along with his discovery of the world and its mechanics, he submerges in his own feelings, without really finding a north to any of his purposes in the external world (be it the world of social dynamics, ambitions, of affections and of responsabilities). His journey begins when he leaves his birthplace in the country and goes to Paris. In this travel, he knows Mme. Arnoux, and then, her husband, with whom he relates very well. Once established in Paris, he keeps this relationship, in hope allways to see the wife.
From that point on, he will get involved in projects of papers, bussiness trades, purchases and social awareness. As the revolution falls upon the city, he tries to get a role in it, but he is soon rejected because of his previous (and allways ambiguous) relations with the burgouise spheres of Paris.
The end of the novel will have him remembering his awakening as a man: he goes to a house, where he can pick from a group of women... but the horizon of possibilities offered by all of them frighten him and he ends up running away... being followed by his best friend; who will allways have to run following Frederic... the one with the money.

A superb translation of a perfect novel
This is simply one of the most satisfying novels I have ever read.And the Parmee translation is excellent - there is not an awkward word or phrase anywhere in the text.Flaubert loved to write fiction which captured the pettiness, baseness, and stupidity of human relations.Misanthrope might be too harsh a word for Flaubert, but he certainly didn't have much patience for the sort of crass greed and shallow, unquestioning conformity he witnessed as a young man in Paris in the Revolution of 1848.I understand that Flaubert started working on this novel very early in his career, but abandoned it several times before finally bringing it to pres in 1869.The care and time Flaubert took in writing this novel shows, especially when you compare it to Madame Bovary, Flaubert's famous book.Bovary is an easier book to "understand".Flaubert may have felt misunderstood.Bovary can be read as an attack on the bourgeoisie, their dull, conformist lives, and the stupid and ultimately self-defeating passions they indulge in an effort to escape from the suffocating monotony of their existence.Or it can be read, as most readers tend to read, as a morality tale about the tragic consequences of adultery.The Sentimental Education sets the record straight, however.Flaubert was not a moralist preaching on the sins of adultery in Bovary.This novel makes that obvious.Here Flaubert again takes up an attack on the bourgeoisie, this time leaving no room for misunderstanding.

I once met someone (a literature student specializing in 19th century fiction, no less!) who complained to me how boring she thought the Sentimental Education was.So boring that she never bothered to finish it.To this day I believe she approached the book in the wrong frame of mind.She may have been expecting some Balzac-ish bildungsroman, about the provincial who comes to Paris and grows into a society man.Instead, she discovered a novel about a dull provincial who comes to Paris thinking he is going to grow into a society man, but is such a poor judge of human character and relations that he meets defeat at every corner.But it is one thing to say the book is dull.It is another to point out that Frederic Moreau is a very dull human being.But then, we remember... we know people like Moreau.At some point or another, we all may have even behaved like Moreau.And we know and live in a society composed of people like the rest of the characters.Moreau's world is the world of bourgeoisie.150 years later, in another language on another continent, I am surprised to see how little some things have changed.

Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, has analyzed this novel extensively (see "The Rules of Art" and "The Field of Cultural Production") because he finds the document perfect for sociological analysis of the bourgeoisie and the intellectual communities that developed in Paris in 1848.Flaubert had a brutally frank eye and pen, quick to capture the most subtle social implications in a single gesture.After reading Flaubert and Bourdieu, I am haunted by how persistent and relevent Flaubert's vision of society and human relations continues to be.

A refreshing cold bath of realism
This is one of those books that every college Freshmen should read.No novel protrays intellectuals more accurately than this one.Flaubert documents their vanity, their dishonesty, their pettiness and their depravity.He shows us what really awful human beings they are.Young people well advised to read the novel before entering the college scene.It will help them enter the academic world with at least some inkling of what themajority (admittedly, not all) intellectuals are really like.

There is an additional reason for reading "The Sentimental Education."It may very well be the most perfect novel ever produced.Not a single word, description, phrase is wasted.It belongs on any short list of the greatest books of all time. ... Read more

Product Description


National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for Biography

A New York Times Notable Book

Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

In this riveting landmark biography, Frederick Brown illuminates the life and career of the author of Madame Bovary. He describes Flaubert's fraught relationship with his longtime mistress Louise Colet, his liaisons with many other women, and his friendships with luminaries such as Turgenev and Zola. Here too is Brown's description of Flaubert's meticulous compositional habits, his painstaking search for the sentence that is deeply, rhythmically right.

Brown brings his subject remarkably and fully to life, illuminating not only the novelist but also his milieu--the Paris and Normandy of the revolution of 1848 and of the Second Empire--with arresting clarity and a deepening sense of Flaubert's time and place. Flaubert is a sophisticated, thorough, and utterly absorbing re-creation of the life and times of the man who is arguably the architect of the modern novel.

Customer Reviews (8)

Not quite unmitigated, but a disaster nonetheless.
Painfully overwritten, with passages of eye-roll-worthy bombast that make one shudder at the thought of ever having to hold a conversation with Brown.The assiduous research the author clearly carried out is, alas, rather poorly edited, and then rendered into passages of the most torturous purple prose.

Flaubert is indeed a fascinating figure; and Brown does not *totally* fail in communicating this.However, for all the technical acumen this biographer is blessed with, he is woefully lacking in grace.Don't come looking for the deft brevity of a skilled historian, but rather for a farrago of murky narrative and hack psychoanalysis reflecting the masturbatory garrulity of a writer blindly infatuated with their own talent.

If you buy it, buy it used.I think someone's selling it for $0.88.

Flaubert, a difficult read
Dense text resulted in my frequent loss of concentration (I got lost).When Flabert is addressed, there are too many assumptions and presumptions.Guessing I can do without.There are passages of literary excellency, but one must weed through too much tedium to find treasures.This is more of a history lesson than a biographical description and analysis.

A Distant View
Be warned: this piece is more about Flaubert, than it is about Brown. Because before discussing Brown's biography, I am sorry to have to discuss Flaubert, the novelist that is, for whom - I have to admit - I don't care much. For although I have read just about everything the man from Rouen wrote, and did so in French, I never felt the urge to start all over again, just for fun. Of Bouvard and Pécuchet, which Flaubert wasn't able to finish, he himselfsaid, many times, that it was an abominable book: "mon bouquin abominable." The best thing I like about B and P (Flaubert's own short title) is the dictionary of clichés, the `dictionnaire des ideés recues', which is very funny. Salammbo is just slightly less tiring than B and P. I don't care much for Flaubert's novellas either, no, not even for A simple heart ("Un coeur simple"), parrot or no parrot, Barnes or no Barnes. I do have a soft spot for Education Sentimentale, although that too is in many ways a troubled book. But it at least has a directness and a flair which is very un-Flaubertian. I more or less like Mme Bovary, of course, although it doesn't really set you on fire and you tend to admire it first and like it after.
Writing for Flaubert always meant starting a project, and "piocher" (toiling) every time he did. It never meant just writing. Except for Bovary every novel or short story took stacks of literature to produce. Just sitting down and writing a story wasn't his style. Visiting libraries, asking friends, studying, going places just to check: and then afterwards complain: why did I ever start?And if just for once there was no research to be done, he was fond of writing a fine sentence, which took a lot of time as well, while at the same time complaining about his colleagues who didn't care how they wrote, meaning just about everyone else. "Industrialists", he called some of his colleagues, not excluding Zola, Daudet or the Goncourt brothers. And they were the ones he liked. It was George Sand, his older and wiser lady-friend from Nohant, whom he admired as a person - but without saying so, didn't take serious as a writer - who once wrote to him, and I paraphrase: what a pity that a man with so much personality, with so many convictions and ideas, who writes so well as long as he doesn't try to hard, has decided to write the way he chooses. Sand was a shrewd woman. She was right of course. I find that great style of Flaubert admirable, but also sterile and cold. If he had been a painter, he would have been Gerome or Bonnat, whom he both knew. The name of Manet appears in his letters only once, just to mention "that he doesn't understand the first thing of his paintings." He didn't care much for painting, or for music by the way: he was a very literary man, almost exclusively so. Yet, I find the distance he demonstrates toward the figures in his stories very French, and slightly inhuman. I like Stendhal, who always addressed himself in bad English in the margins of his manuscripts, and now and then wrote sloppy French in between, but who could also demonstrate a spontaneous esprit that is a pleasure to read, every time you do. When Flaubert, in 1878, is asking Taine about editions of Stendhal which he can use for his B and P, he calls his colleague an idiot, and I am not sure he is joking.
So, isn't there anything I like about Flaubert? Oh yes, there is. And no, it isn't very original to say this, because it has been said many times before: if Flaubert hadn't written his letters, I doubt if he would enjoy the status he enjoys now. He destroyed important parts of his correspondence, so that the five (French language) Pleiade-volumes of about 7500 pages, including some 2000 pages of annotation, contain just a part of what he actually wrote, but it is Flaubert's correspondence which still makes him worth wile. His letters immediately make clear why his friends and acquaintances were so impressed by him. Practically all of it written in the deep of night, or early in the morning, so that they are always dated one day late, produced in a hurry after his normal writing, but in sheer weight and volume many times as large, his correspondence is a work of real genius and shows an artist art work as you seldom see. The letters are eminently readable, are fun, and belong without a doubt to what is best in world-literature. In them Flaubert can be humorous, cynical, sarcastic and sentimental, and is always eloquent. He can be a hypocrite, a buffoon, and a whorechaser who talks very dirty now and then, but who also loves his mother and his (as far as I am concerned very unpleasant) niece.And then there - at last - appears Brown. Two months after Browns biography was published, in France appeared the fifth (and last) volume of Flaubert's letters in the Pléiade (Gallimard), finishing an edition that started in 1973. Brown says that he has been able to read the 5th volume before it was published in December 2008, and he obviously did.
Browns biography is, well,... I hesitate... okay, it `s adequate, but I also find it very aloof. He has a keen eye for human weakness, treats Flaubert in a businesslike way, and does justice to his talents and his faults, sketching the background where necessary, functioning as an accompanimentto the annotation of his letters. It certainly sheds no new light. Brown has just been doing what has already been done by many others. I felt the same way about his book on Zola, which was just as businesslike and fair as his biography of Flaubert. Brown writes well, as someone should who wants to write about Flaubert, but the only parts of the book that really come to life - in both biographies - are the parts about French history, about the background, as if Brown found writing the life stories a duty, and only had fun when he could get away from them, writing about Dreyfus in Zola, and about 19th century French politics (Thiers, Gambetta) in Flaubert for instance. The idea of following up Zola with Flaubert is not without its logic. It makes the biographers life easier, the two knew each other well and even professed to admire each other. But Flaubert made fun of Zola's scientific ideas, and rightly so, and Zola, who was an able producer of novels for the general taste (and who was just as smart in letting others produce plays based on them), must have had his reservations about Flaubert's artistry and literary snobbism. But the boy from Aix and the one from Rouen, outsiders both of them, hankering for success, while denying to do so, also recognized each other's seriousness, and although Flaubert considered himself a conservative, most of his close artist friends tended to the left. I suppose, well, I hope, that Flaubert, had he lived, would have been proud of Zola's J `Accuse, and would have been a staunch Dreyfusard. Maybe it's time for Brown, while he is at it, just for efficiency's sake, to go on, and start writing a biography of Maupassant now, to whom Flaubert wrote many letters ("mon disciple"), one of them ending in: "I touch myself when I think of you", and signed: "sister clitoris." Flauberts letters are not for the bourgeois, whom he despised. They beat any biography and deserve to be translated in full, though they probably never will. It takes a real hero to just try.

Superb scholarship but title misleads
I understand that another author's biography was more psychological and I understand that Frederick Brown wanted to examine Flaubert in a more social, historical context. I just wish Brown had come up with a slightly different title for his biography of my all-time favorite writer. Titling the biography *Flaubert* lent me to think the biography would be more psychological, rather than historical. Perhaps Brown should have considered something like *Flaubert and Normandy* or *Flaubert's Normandy.* The historical passages are well done, but I wonder if they could have been trimmed a bit. Though I have been trained in European history, I gritted my teeth while reading every word. I wonder if Brown thought to himself, "Now let me get through this so that we can get back to Flaubert's literary tribulations and relationships." Flaubert's literary struggles and relationships are the most fascinating part of this biography.

My gripes aside, this biography is densely (in the best sense of the word) and beautifully written. Flaubert's best and not so great moments are limned gorgeously. The most touching aspect of the man is how good he was to his niece Caroline and how she honored his memory. I wished I had been Willa Cather when she encountered Caroline to talk about "les ouevres de mon oncle."

Amazon shines re books
Everything as promised; prompt delivery of pristine copy of the book ... Read more

Product Description
A captivating and evocative work, and one of Flaubert’s earliest writings, Memoirs of a Madman forms the basis of his masterpiece, L’ Education Sentimentale.

As a young man looks back on the years that have brought him to “madness,” he recalls the innocence of his boyhood and his fond belief that he was blessed with a mind of genius. Yet, painfully, wretchedly, he also recounts his all–too–sudden entry into the adult world. For the day that he caught sight of a beautiful woman by the sea marked the end of his flamboyant philosophizing and the beginning of his tragic coming of age.Foreword by Germaine Greer. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Sentimental Mood
Lord, if only I had been able to write like this at that age.This is a really amusing and quick paced memoir of an infatuated teen.Flaubert perfectly captures that obsessiveness of infatuation and young love.His description of the beach alone is worth the read.Plus, the edition is handsome and well put together.
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Product Description
L’Éducation sentimentale, histoire d’un jeune homme est un roman écrit par Gustave Flaubert, et publié en 1869.
Le cœur du récit est tiré du roman de Sainte-Beuve : Volupté, qu’Honoré de Balzac avait déjà traité et d’une certaine manière réécrit avec le Lys dans la vallée. Le roman de Flaubert reprend le même sujet selon des règles narratives entièrement neuves, réinventant le roman d'apprentissage pour lui donner une profondeur et une acuité jamais atteinte. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

bad edition
The kindle edition of L'Education Sentimentale (in french) by Flaubert is just awful. No dots, no commas, lack of paragraphs and part of sentences that make the reading nearly impossible. I'm not complaining about Flaubert's writing, but about the kindle edition I've got.

L'edition Kindle de L'Education Sentimentale de Flaubert en Français est affreuse. Il y a de graves problemes de ponctuation et d'edition. Cela rend la lecture practiquement impossible. ... Read more

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This is a new translation selecting from the voluminous 4-volume Pleiade edition of Flaubert's "Correspondence". This edition will generally seek to represent complete letters rather than extracts. ... Read more

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A Simple Soul, written by legendary author Gustave Flaubert is widely considered to be one of the greatest books of all time. This great classic will surely attract a whole new generation of readers. For many, A Simple Soul is required reading for various courses and curriculums. And for others who simply enjoy reading timeless pieces of classic literature, this gem by Gustave Flaubert is highly recommended. Published by Classic Books International and beautifully produced, A Simple Soul would make an ideal gift and it should be a part of everyone's personal library. ... Read more

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