The Letters of Gustave Flaubert ; edited and translated from the French by Francis Steegmuller.- 2023 - 715 Pages - A Paris in July 2024 Work

Paris in July 2024

Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Parisian history and more are very welcome. On the home page for the event you will inevitably discover perhaps new to you authors, movies as well as recipes to send you if you are lucky to Paris or at least the kitchen.

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert / by Gustave Flaubert; edited and translated from the French by Francis Steegmuller.- 2023 - 715 Pages - A Paris in July 2024 Work

Gustave Flaubert 

Born 12 - 12 - 1821

Madame Bovary - 1857

Salammbó 1862

Sentimental Education 1869

The Temptation of Saint Anthony 1874

Dies 5- 8 - 1882

 Madame Bovary is without dispute among the greatest of all novels. Sentimental Education is masterpiece. His other two novels are "strange".  

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert -edited and translated from the French by Francis Steegmuller.- 2023 - 715 Pages is an extraordinarly valuable work for all seriously into Flaubert but lacking fluency in French.

--“If there is one article of faith that dominates the Credo of Gustave Flaubert’s correspondence,” Francis Steegmuller writes in the introduction to this selection of Flaubert’s letters, “it is that the function of great art is not to provide ‘answers.’” The Letters of Gustave Flaubert is above all a record of the intransigent questions—personal, political, artistic—with which Flaubert struggled throughout his life.

Here we have Flaubert’s youthful, sensual outpourings to his mistress, the poet Louise Colet, and, as he advances, still unknown, into his thirties, the wrestle to write Madame Bovary. We hear, too, of his life-changing trip to Egypt, as described to family and friends, and then there are lively exchanges with Baudelaire, with the influential critic Sainte-Beuve, and with Guy de Maupassant, his young protégé. Flaubert’s letters to George Sand reveal her as the great confidante of his later years.

Steegmuller’s book, a classic in its own right, is both a splendid life of Flaubert in his own words and the ars poetica of the master who laid the foundations for modern writers from James Joyce to Lydia Davis. Originally issued in two volumes, the book appears here for the first time under a single cover.-- From The New York Review of Books

 

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert - 1856 - translated by Lydia Davis - 2010

Gustave Flaubert

December 12, 1821

1856 - Madame Bovary

1869 - Sentimental Education 

May 8, 1880

This is my fourth  reading of Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, the first was decades ago, the second just before I began The Reading Life eleven  years ago. The last prior to this month was five years ago.  My reading of the universally praised translation by Lydia Davis, including her introduction, will not, I hope be my last.

Madame Bovary is as high a canon status work as exists.

Here are some of my thoughts from May, 2014.


"I think I first became aware of the cultural importance of Madame Bovary around 1960 through reading of it in The Life Time Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman.  I still have, in a newer edition, Fadiman's book (which I endorse strongly to those seeking to be literary autodidacts, especially isolated young readers as I was)so I reread his remarks on the novel.  Admist the obligatory praise, he describes it as "cold and depressing".    Is there anyone in the novel we can admire at all?  The answer seems to be no.  Madame Bovary is a vain, totally self-centered fool, a terrible wife and worse mother.  Dr. Bovary is pretty much a dolt.  The secondary characters are either out to have sex with Emma or trick her into signing promissory notes for merchandise she can use to seem "high society".  Emma is ruined through credit purchases for fancy clothes and such designed to make her appear high society.  The supposed theme of my blog is a focus on books about characters that lead reading centered lives.  It was reading romance novels that made Emma bored with the simple life she lead as the wife of a country doctor.   These books helped to ruin her life, her husband's and that of her daughter.  

So is this Pantheon status work "cold and depressing"?  Ask if the murals of Anghor Wat depicting horrible battles are depressing, if Picasso's Guernica is cold.  Maybe it is chiily on Mount Parnassus but the climb is exhilarating and maybe if one wants to counter Fadiman, to be able to contemplate such works, in which I include Madame Bovary, while knowing we are of the species about which Flaubert writes is an exhilarating experience."

The lengthy depiction of the suicide of Madame Bovary is incredibly powerful, almost overwhelming.  The spiral to an early death of Charles Bovary after this is the work of a master. Davis has produced high art.  

Sentimental Education is perhaps a more "likeable" book.

Aspiring novelist, literary autodidacts must read this Madame Bovary.  If you cannot read French, by all means read the Lydia Davis translation.

I have her translation of Swann's Way and hope to read it soon.

Mel u

Salammbô by Gustave Flaubert (1862, some editions title it Salambo)

Gustave Flaubert (1821 to 1880) wrote two of the greatest novels of all time.  In 1857 he published his ice cold work of perfection Madame Bovary and in 1869 Sentimental Education, worthy of comparison with the greatest novels in the world.  In between he wrote Salammbô  (1862) which is the weirdest 19th century novel I have yet read.  It is set in the third century BC at the start of the first Punic Wars.  On one side was the North African city state of Carthage, on the other a besieging Roman army.

The book is pretty much one long descriptions of battles, fights, soldiers of all sorts and exotic maidens.  It is full of blood, torture and sexual fantasies played out.  The descriptive power and imagination  of Flaubert as he produced endless descriptions of the multi-ethnic army assembled by the Romans to take Carthage are marvelous. The women are fantasy figures of the standard sort.   If you like descriptions of torture and creative methods of execution you will find a lot to like in this book.  This book sold very well, probably Flaubert in his descriptions of exotic women pushed the limits in 1862.  

The title character Salammbô is a She Who Must Be Obeyed and Worhshipped for her Beauty straight out of your fantasies figure.  There is little or no character development.   You don't care who wins or loses you just keep going thinking ok a literary genius wrote it so I guess I should finish it.  She is depicted as in love with a very large snake.  A video game was based on it and a movie.

It was fun to read just to see how "whacked out" Flaubert would get.  My post read research says he spent years researching the history from the best sources of the time.   

My wild guess is that  if this book were not written by an ultra-high status author, very few would read it, fewer than those who do even now.  It was fun, it got a bit boring at times but the sheer imagination of Flaubert made me glad to have read Salammbô.  It is a "boy's fantasy book".  It could be castigated as Orientalism run wild if you wanted to tear it down.  My advice of course is to read his big books first, then read them again, then venture on with his other novels.  I also have read his The Temptations of Saint Anthony and it was iñdeed very strange.

 

Mel u

Ambrosia Bousweau 

A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert (1869, translated by Donald Parmée)

Some thoughts on my third reading of A Sentimental Education .  Dandys and all that!

"He traveled.

  Chilly adventures under canvas; dreary mail-packets; the dizzy kaleidoscope of landscapes and ruins; the bitter taste of friendships nipped in the bud:  such was the pattern of his life.

   He came home.

   He went into society..desire had lost its edge, the very springs of feeling had tried up.  his intellectual ambitions had also faded.  Years passed, and he came to terms with his mental stagnation and the numbness in his heart". From A Sentimental Education, part three, chapter six.

"The Dandy who begins with a taste for the heroic soon funds that there is no theater in which to exact heroism and he or she is driven back in the studio and drawing room, there to bemoan his frustration.  Perhaps the most finished example of the type in 19th century literature is Flaubert's Frederic Moureau, a figure which arises in the interregnum between a lost ancien regime and the replacement by a new code" - from Inventing Ireland -  Literature of the Modern Nation by Declan Kiberd.

As I read A Sentimental Education for the third time i had the thoughts of Declan Kiberd as a kind of guide.  As one reads on in the novel when the politcal turmoil in the country turns to violence in the streets in Paris, I thought could perceive a correspondence of the life history of Frederic Moureau to that of the country, both go through great turmoil to no real result.  The education of both teaches them to withdraw, to cultivate the self.

I am very interested in the figure of the dandy in literature.   I see him emerging in France in The Comedie Humaine to perhaps achieve apogee in Proust.  As mentioned by Susan Sontag in her "Notes on Camp", the dandy is related to camp somehow but dandys are not camp, dandys are not fops.  Camp and homosexuality are culturally linked and there are complex connections with this to the dandy.A dandy is a highly cultivated person, man or woman, often culturally refined to a level beyond the understanding of all but a few people.  The dandy plays a large role in Japanese literature, between the wars.  I have posted a lot on the role of the dandy in the short stories of Desmond Hogan.    Many dandys, as are the men in A Sentimental Education, are very much into prostitutes .  A knowledge of prostitutes and brothels  can be cultivated much like a knowledge of Opera or Chinese Cermamics.  Think for a bit on the person of James Bosewell.  

I laughed out loud at the hilarious duel scene and greatly relished the depiction of the fighting in the streets of Paris.  The food scenes were mouthwatering.  

From this point on, this is a rewritten mostly for style post from 2013.

Gustave Flaubert's (1821 to 1880) Madame Bovary is on everyone's list of best novels ever written, including mine.    To me Madame Bovary is an ice cold work of perfection in which one can only stand in awe.  I also think the only reason A Sentimental Education is not on all lists is that list makers fear two books by one author is somehow "unfair".

I first read Flaubert's  A Sentimental Education about four years ago.

Ford Madox Ford  purportedly said  one could not consider themself an educated person until you had read it fourteen times.   

  In very well done introduction to the Oxford Classics edition Parmee flirts with the idea of saying A Sentimental Education is better than War and Peace .  I really liked A Sentimental Education however I think one does not just like Madame Bovary any more than one would like the Taj Mahal or Guernica.

Here are some of the things I like about this book.   I like the character development of the central figure, Frederic Moreau.   The work is really full of great descriptions of life in Paris.  I enjoyed the accounts of political turmoil.  The food sounds great and there are some interesting romances along the way.  Some people, including Henry James, see this as a huge step down from Madame Bovary.  Aside from the fact that almost every novel is a huge step down from Madame Bovary I think one should first read it then this work.   The characters in A Sentimental Education are very self absorbed and the development of the education of Frederic is slow.   I liked the novel a lot as a whole but I loved the last chapter when we flash to Frederic as an older man, still pursuing a life of pleasure.   It was a lot of fun to hear of his visit in company of one of his close friends to a brothel and how it ruined their reputations when word got out.  Later the two men talk about how these times were the best of their lives.

Mel u
The Reading Life