Word: flaubert
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...When Flaubert died in 1880, he left Bouvard and Pecuchet, his "kind of encyclopedia made into a farce," unfinished and unedited. In scope, it was to be Flaubert's masterpiece: a satiric work compounded of his life-long scorn of the bourgeoisie, their morals, their intellectual giddiness, their thoughtless generalizations...
...Flaubert's best friends tried to dissuade him. Russian Novelist Ivan Turgenev reminded him that Voltaire had dashed off Candide, the finest satire in French letters, in just three days; he warned Flaubert to work fast or not at all. But Flaubert plodded along at his own schedule, poring through some 1,500 volumes as research. After eight years, not quite finished with his story but with the end clearly indicated, Flaubert died. Now, for the first time, the English-reading public can judge for itself whether Flaubert or Turgenev was right...
...Gold! It's Gold!" Flaubert's simpletons are a Mutt & Jeff pair. François Denys Bartholomée Bouvard is fat and gay, Juste Romain Cyrille Pécuchet thin and dour. When they come into some money, they move to Normandy and become gentlemen-farmers, foreseeing "mountains of fruit, torrents of flowers, avalanches of vegetables." Pan and brush in hand, Pécuchet tramps the roads for fertilizer. When others contemptuously hold their noses, Bouvard cries, "But it's gold! It's gold!" Too much "gold" burns out the strawberry patch...
...reading that the Loire during the French Revolution was "red with blood from Saumur to Nantes, a length of 45 miles." But Dumas' romantic novels enchant them with the news of life they find there, i.e., that "love observes the proprieties, fanaticism is lighthearted, massacres excite a smile." Flaubert's unwritten but clearly foreshadowed ending: frustrated and impoverished, the simpletons go back to work as copying clerks...
...Crush a Farce. In English, as in French, Flaubert's catalogue of follies is well short of hilarious. He believed that if he made his story "concise and light, it would be a fantasy-more or less witty, but without weight or plausibility." But his text tends to prove that in writing Bouvard, Flaubert spent eight years with the wrong idea...