Flaubert Reading Spree

Keen readers know the joy of mining a deep seam of interest in a topic as we move from one lead to another, books leading on from one to another. I had this experience recently with the French master, Gustave Flaubert. I started by re-reading Madame Bovary, Flaubert's most famous novel. I read it in a new translation by Lydia Davis and it was a revelation. I had read the book many years ago and was swept up then by the strength of the marvellous story, but my new reading brought me to a much greater appreciation of Flaubert's brilliant writing style and I wanted to know more about the author.

Flaubert (1821 - 1880), lived and died more or less on the same piece of ground in and around the French city of Rouen. He spent most of his adult life living quietly with his mother, niece and their various housekeepers in their large house beside the River Seine at Croisset, just outside Rouen. He needed quietness and solitude to compose his great works of literature, but he also, from time to time, bit sharply into the big apple of friendship, love, cosmopolitanism and travel.

While he had a great capacity for friendship and was loved by women, Flaubert hated the idea of marriage or of anything, the career in law that he was expected to enter for instance, that would fix him into the cement of a bourgeois existence . He loathed bourgeois values and views which he contrasted with his own beliefs in the value of art and the life of the artist. 

Those beliefs come out in all his novels where he lampoons human stupidity with great delight while he lingers over the exact description he wants to create. As he wrote of his slow, painstaking way of composing:

'May I die like a dog rather than hurry by a single second a sentence that isn't ripe.' 

Flaubert's letters are an absolute joy to read though not very easy to obtain. Luckily my local regional library still has Volume 1 of the Letters, edited by Francis Steegmuller, a great Flaubert scholar. I am yet to find a copy of Volume 2 and may have to read it in the State Library. However, the letters are full of the most tantalising ideas about art and life with Flaubert's dark, but amused, view of humanity's follies being very apparent.

He was not at all impressed by the idea of 'progress' and indeed his rejection of any such idea is a big theme in his books, including Madame Bovary. He hated the railways that set up during his lifetime, believing that they would only enable people to move around more,meet, and be stupid together.  One can only imagine his disgust at our modern, frantic, moving around. No doubt the advent of tweeting, messaging, and blogging, would have appalled him deeply.