Book Description
1930. With illustrations by Mahlon Blaine. Flaubert was a French novelist of the realist school, best-known for his story of Madame Bovary. The Temptation of St. Anthony was based on the story of the 4th-century Christian anchorite, who lived in the Egyptian desert and experienced philosophical and physical temptations. Its fantastic mode and setting were inspired by a Brueghel painting. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Good for understanding Flaubert as well as religeous history
As others have noted, this book is particularly helpful when trying to understand Flaubert and his other works. The popularly read Madame Bovary in particular features a character, Homais, who continually tries to impose his own ideas about religeon on people who aren't even interested in listening... it is interesting to see, though, where views similar to Homais' come out in the Temptation of St. Anthony.

The work itself is written like a play, though to do this on stage would be an interesting feat. It would perhaps better take the form of film, such as Bunuel's Simon in the Desert.

For those interested in getting in to studying early Christian movements following the death of Christ, although this will hardly serve as a textbook, Flaubert seems to have had a broad repetoir of little known (today, at least) historical facts and facets that will help point an aspiring student in the right direction.

Though hardly light reading, and probably of little appeal to those who do not have an interest in either Flaubert, French literature, or religeon, the trials and tribulations Antony is subjected to through one night of temptation will be at the least entertaining, if not enlightening, to a few.

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

Book Description
Set against the backdrop of the 1848 Revolution, A Sentimental Education is the story of young lawyer Frederic Moreau's infatuation with the demurely exotic Madame Arnoux. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

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.

x
A decently written novel of Paris, 1840s, centers on young student Frederic Moreau matriculating through 10 years of his young life amid personal struggles and tumultuous revolutionary period in France.Various characters pop in and out, all possessing presumed intelligence, and quirky "with it" personalities.There are artists, editors, students, lawyers, bohemians, politicos, sharing common friendship, daily chat sessions, a little coterie of characters reminding of Greenwich Village 1960.The stage is set for a series of interesting interactions between Paris intellectuals with multiple possibilities for a powerful story.Even the title here suggests a subtlety of creativity and art.In my opinion, Flaubert falls far short of potential here, and my maximum comment re the book is that it is somewhat cute.The author fails to develop the characters.We get bits and pieces but finish without full understanding of any of them.The story line basically degenerates to Frederic Moreau's seduction of various women, mostly other men's wifes with the modus operendi being befriend the husband, seduce the wife.In the end, with the protagonist's 100% failure rate, we have "Sentimental Education" I suppose. But despite the cuteness, the basic story is of hypocrisy and the ironic disgusting behavior of the main character all without comment by the author.Little to redeem this and very forgettable. ... Read more

Product Description
Although unfinished during his lifetime, Bouvard and Pécuchet is now considered to be one of Flaubert's greatest masterpieces. In his own words, the novel is "a kind of encyclopedia made into farce . . . A book in which I shall spit out my bile." At the center of this book are Bouvard and Pécuchet, two retired clerks who set out in a search for truth and knowledge with persistent optimism in light of the fact that each new attempt at learning about the world ends in disaster.

In the literary tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift, this story is told in that blend of satire and sympathy that only genius can compound, and the reader becomes genuinely fond of these two Don Quixotes of Ideas. Apart from being a new translation, this edition includes Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

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

Book Description
For this novel of French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, Flaubert invented a paradoxically original and wholly modern style. His heroine, Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. A succès de scandale in its day, Madame Bovary remains a powerful and arousing novel.

Translated with an Introduction by Geoffrey Wall
New Preface by Michèle Roberts ... Read more

Customer Reviews (19)

Madame Bovary: Classic Novel of a Cinderella Dreamer whose Prince Never Arrived
Madame Bovary is the greatest novel written by Gustave Flaubert. The 1855
masterpiece portrays in searing detail the tragic tale of a young girl whose dreams turned into nightmares; whose sandcastles are swept away by unfulfilled passion; whose young life is ended in a tragic death. Years before Tolstoy limned the adultress woman in his Anna Karenina we see the consequences which ensue when a middle class wife and mother breaks the seventh commandment.
The novel takes place near Rouen in the north of France. There are actually three Madame Bovarys in the story. Madame Bovary Sr. who is the mother of Charles Bovary dominates her weak son. Madame Bovary I is an ugly but wealthy woman who dies allowing Charles to wed the lovely Emma
Bovary who is the the famed woman of the book's title. Emma has grown up on a farm coddled by her widower father. She has immersed herself in romantic tales and spent time in a French convent. Emma dreams of castles in the air and a charming prince to take her to paradise. Today she would be a reader of Harlequin Romances. She is a virgin plum ripe for picking!
Charles Bovary ("bovine" meaning cow-like; also think "ovary for his scandolous wife Emma) is a dull, stupid and lethargic public health inspector. He is a good man but is a total dullard! Charles weds Emma after treating her father. At first all goes well as the couple set up house in a French provincial town where little exciting ever occurs. They have a daughter Berthe with whom Emma has little to do. She never grows up to becoming a mature woman.
Emma carries on two affairs in the novel with the law student Leon and the wealthy but callous womanizing aristocrat Rodolphe. She is sucked into a cesspool of overwhelming debt being addicted to clothing, jewelry and furniture. Emma's lovers forsake her as her disillusionment with men and life itelf takes over life. Madame Bovary ends her life by committing suicide. The account of her horrific, painful and grotesque death from her fatal injection of arsenic rat poison will never be forgotten by the
reader. Despite her many sins she deserves pity at such a sad end. Her husband dies a few years later and her daughter has to be farmed out to a relative.
What makes this novel of adultery, satirical views of provincial life, mockery of the relgious hypocrisy in the French countryside and lacerating portraits of such types as the village atheist Homais so great? In my opinion the reasons this is such a landmark work must include:
a. A picture of a woman seeking to break out of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie view of females as placid wives and mothers with no aspirations of their own. Throughout the novel there are images of birds seeking freedom from cages. Emma is a modern feminist in the nineteenth century society she finds impossible to escape. Emma is an iconoclastic rebel.
b. A satirical and cynical view of human hypocrisy drawn with skill in the pictures Flaubert draws of such figures as the village priest, scientist, merchants and moneylenders. Society is concerned with money and social status to the detriment of more spiritual and ethical values.
c. Flaubert introduces a new realism to the novel which will influence such naturalist as Emile Zola and others. The novel reads as if it was written today instead of over 150 years ago.
d. Flaubert's descriptions of the beauty of nature (and its indifference to human suffering and troubles) are beautifully etched. His use of language and the level of suspense he maintains throughout the work are excellent.
e. Flaubert is not afraid to describe female sexual longings. His sex scenes are tasteful to our eyes but viewed as prurient reading in his own day.
Penguin editons are always a joy to read with their critical apparatus and excellent introductions. Enjoy this great work of literature as soon as you can!

A Compelling, Complex, Classic
"The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ''What does a woman want?'"Sigmund Freud

This is one unforgettable classic!I don't even know how to begin describing it, mainly because of the complexity of the main character Emma Bovary.When I finished this novel (almost in tears, for the ending is both tragic and very distressing) I walked away from it feeling extremely fortunate to be born in a time and place in which I have complete freedom.For, in a nutshell, what plagued our heroine throughout her entire life was the simple fact that she was trapped being a woman in a man's world (the novel takes place during the mid 19th century in Normandy).You see, Madame B. is no common, run-of-the-mill mademoiselle.On the contrary this gal is blessed with it all - beauty, brains, passion, etc... You name it, she's got it!She is the true embodiment of femininity - possessing style, grace, and a keen eye for artistic beauty, on top of also being a great cook, excellent piano player, having a knack for home-decor, sewing, drawing, etc... There is seemingly nothing she can't do or isn't good at.

Her tragic mistake (which is usually the case with many talented people throughout history) is that she marries the wrong person.Her husband Charles Bovary is a man who 'knew nothing, taught nothing, desired nothing' the complete antithesis of his enlightened wife Emma.Flaubert further defines him early on in the novel: 'Charles's conversation was as flat as any pavement... rousing no emotion, no laughter, no reverie.He had never ventured to the theatre... he couldn't swim, or fence or shoot...' In other words, he's boring as hell, and although he absolutely worships the ground his wife walks on, she, on the other hand, slowly begins to resent this servile, supine, sappy simpleton she finds herself tied down to.To complicate matters even further, she ends up pregnant and giving birth to a girl, Berthe (of course Emma was hoping and praying for a son, for 'a man, at least, is free...').Depressed and engrossed with the eternal ennui, which inflicts so many women who marry men they feel no passion nor love toward, Emma embarks on her own personal crusade to find that happiness which always seems to be eluding her.A self-indulgent quest that in the end, only leads to catastrophic consequences for both her and her family.

What makes this masterpiece "Madame Bovary" such an interesting read is how totally modern this story is.Emma, desperately seeking an escape from being a lonesome, unfulfilled house-wife and mother, soon becomes a shopaholic, racking up debt all over town.When she is not shopping and spending money, she's having adulterous liaisons with men who... well, you shall have to see for yourself.While I was reading this, I kept thinking to myself, I know women like this!I see them all the time in the area (Silicon Valley, Northern California) in which I live.Beautiful women, who married their far from beautiful husbands for money and security.They don't work, have nannies taking care of the kids, while they cruise around in their new Mercedes or BMW shopping all day and hopping in the sack (although, like Emma, very discreetly) with one man after another.They hang out at upscale bars/restaurants with each other bitching about how difficult their lives are, how much they despise their husbands, their next trip to Europe, etc... while sipping on hundred dollar bottles of wine and comparing plastic surgeons.Talk about a sad, pathetic life... Just like Emma, these barracudas are completely empty inside.They can find no happiness from within, and the more material things they possess, the more their insatiable appetites go unfed...There is no price that can be placed for love.No one material item or one night of unbridled, erotic passion can ever replace the true love of a spouse or child.

The first part (there are three parts in all) of this novel was a bit slow, but once you get to part two, be prepared to be totally enraptured with this beautiful story.I am so happy, after all of these years, to have finally read this excellent classic.Truly worthy of five stars!

Disturbingly Brilliant
When I first began reading Madame Bovary, I was skeptical about a book revolving around the telltale subject-adultery. I was wondering how the reader was supposed to root for a woman who forsakes her husband again and again to seek self-absorbed, transient passions.

Brilliantly, Flaubert situates the novel so the reader can sympathize with either. He introduces the husband first, which is significant, as we know his back-story, but then we are introduced to the restrained beauty in the convent who longs for the adventures she zealously consumes in her books. It is a colorful account of a woman trying to chase away the boredom in her life. Absolutely brilliant.

The unsurpassed masterpiece of the European novel
Beyond its deservedly much-praised stylistic and structural perfection, the power of Gustave Flaubert's spectacular novel "Madame Bovary" comes from the fact that it addresses head-on one of the fundamental issues of human existence: the mechanisms humans invent for themselves to meet their own emotional needs. Romantic love is presented here as such a mechanism invented to help satisfy the human urge for sex in a non-commercial setting, in other words without direct cash payment, as for instance in prostitution.

Indeed, to survive, a man --- let me start with a man and not with Emma Bovary herself--- needs to eat, he needs to have a roof over his head and as of the onset of puberty he has to have his sexual needs attended to. To eat, man can shop for food, that's what the grocer is for. The home he needs can also be purchased, not from the grocer but from the builder and the decorator. When it comes to the sex, that too is freely available for purchase in any society, whether or not it is run by the bourgeoisie. In this case the purchase is made neither from the grocer, nor from the builder or the decorator, but from the prostitute. Remarkably, before meeting her, both Emma Bovary's lovers, had met their sexual needs in this commercial setting. We see Rodolphe Boulanger, even before becoming Emma's first lover, cynically calculating how he is going to get rid of her, once he will have had enough. After all, that is the only detail that strikes him as different from what transpires in a sexual transaction with a prostitute whom he can quit without any discussion as soon as he has paid up. He wants to connect with Emma not to save himself some money, he is well-to-do after all, but to "experience" non-commercial sex. Of course, unlike a prostitute, you do not pay an adulteress in cash. Another form of payment is extracted. The price is a pretense of love, of romantic love like in novels. Yes, Emma Bovary has read many a romantic novel in her time and knows all-too-well what to expect in matters of such romantic love. It is spectacular to watch how Emma and both her lovers play this romantic love game and in moments of sexual abandon are able to completely suspend disbelief. Flaubert is reducing romantic love to a currency, not unlike the cash that buys life's other necessities.

To Emma, a woman, love is something else altogether, something learned from novels. In this respect she drives Flaubert to one of the main issues of western civilization's novel, the effect of romantic novels on naïve readers. This issue had been forcefully raised already by Miguel de Cervantes, the inventor of the modern western novel. After all, his Don Quixote de la Mancha, is also an avid reader of romantic novels, and the lessons he draws from this reading set him up for fighting windmills, and asexually revering Dulcinea, a feminine creation of his own imagination. Emma Bovary, reads not the Spanish trash available to the Knight of the Mournful Countenance, but Sir Walter Scott and his like. Her second love affair is jump-started at a performance of Gaetano Donizetti's operatic setting of Sir Walter's "The Bride of Lammermoor." Whereas Cervantes pokes fun at the romantic novel, Flaubert explores what appear to be its outright tragic consequences. In this sense "Madame Bovary" is about the role of literature in everyday life.

But at a closer look, this role of literature is not as tragic by far as it first appears. After all, when dumped by Rodolphe Boulanger, her first lover, Emma Bovary gets herself a second lover Léon Dupuis, and could probably get herself a third lover once the affair with Léon runs its course. She is done in not by matters of love, but by the cavalier manner in which she handles her own and her husband's finances. It is her dealings with the unscrupulous merchant Lheureux that bring about her downfall. Lheureux couldn't care less about love, he is a strictly cash-and-carry fellow. In his own way, he tries to help Emma, to bring her to her senses. He sends her to the notary Guillaumin, who for a change offers to pay for her sexual services with money rather than with professions of romantic love. This prompts a revolted Emma's famous line, "Sir, you shamelessly take advantage of my distress. I am to be pitied, but I am not for sale." Spoken like a reader of Sir Walter Scott. Emma Bovary's willingness to find the sweet nothings whispered in her ear by Rodolphe and Léon as the only currency in which to accept payment for her sexual services, is tantamount to Don Quixote's willingness to fight the windmills.

So, in the end, Madame Bovary is as much about the role of literature in our lives, as about adultery or bourgeois philistinism, its most obvious themes. Lest one walk away with a bad feeling where matters literary are concerned, Flaubert spikes his text with his remarkable insights into the nature of great literature. Consider a paragraph in part II, Chapter 12, which starts as an astute examination of Rodolphe's jaded reaction to Emma's romantic chit-chat, and then smoothly meanders into as good a statement of the basic problem faced by a writer, as has ever been put in words by anyone "Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing bears, while aiming to move the stars to tears." Never mind the bears, Flaubert shoots for the stars and is right on target.

Madame Bovary, or Provincial Lives
Flaubert himself gave the book two titles. The first, MADAME BOVARY, is Emma, a beautiful convent-educated bourgeoise who, growing up reading nothing but Romantic literature, expects real life to match. Marrying a devoted but prosaic husband, she seeks solace where she can find it, with predictably tragic results. It is a beautifully anti-romantic object lesson in the dangers of romanticism, told with a sexual frankness which shocked its original readers, but which now inevitably seems a little tame.

But this sordid plot is contained in a novel that is satirical, even comic, portraying the complex pettiness inherent in the book's second title, PROVINCIAL LIVES. Flaubert hilariously counterpoints Emma's first steps towards adultery, for instance, with the speechifying of some petty functionary at an agricultural fair. In addition to Emma's mediocre doctor husband Charles, and her two lovers (the infatuated Léon and the libertine Rodolphe), the author includes many peripheral characters who together make up a portrait of small-town society, from the self-aggrandizing apothecary Homais to the draper and usurious money-lender Lheureux. But Flaubert can also temper his satirical edge in magnificent descriptions of scenes ranging from a village market to a provincial opera performance. [While I am in no position to say if the Penguin translation by Geoffrey Wall is better or worse than the others available, it is certainly good enough to give me much enjoyment in these passages, and is faithful to the French text of those sections that I have compared.]

Though tied to a particular place and time, the social and commercial elements of the story come across with startling modernity. It is, as I say, a little difficult to recapture the physical eroticism that so shocked its original readers, but its psychological aspect is still acute. Indeed, whether fully-fleshed or sketched in, the psychology of Flaubert's characters always rings true. For all that, Flaubert always has the air of writing from the outside, even when talking about Emma. The result is to show a story of decline that is all too plausible, and which leaves one helpless to intervene. The Bovary story may end in tragedy, but the provincial comedy that contains it continues unruffled on its petty course. ... Read more

Book Description
Francis Steegmuller's beautifully executed double portrait of Madame Bovary and her maker is a remarkable and unusual biographical study, a sensitive and detailed account of how an unpromising young man turns himself into one of the world's greatest novelists. Steegmuller starts with the young Flaubert, prone to mysterious fits, hypochondriacal, at odds with and yet dependent on his bourgeois family. Then, drawing on Flaubert's voluminous correspondence, Steegmuller tracks his subject through friendships and love affairs, a trip to the Orient, nervous breakdown and tenuous recovery, and finally into the study, where a mind at once restless and jaded finds a focus in the precisely detailed reality of an imagined woman, utterly ordinary in her unhappiness, whose story was to revolutionize literature. ... Read more

Book Description
This Companion's textual analysis of the complete range of Flaubert's work, including Madame Bovary, is accompanied by discussion of broader theoretical issues, including Flaubert's place in the canon of French literature. The series of new essays represents the latest scholarly thinking on the novelist's work and critical legacy. A variety of critical approaches provides insight into the continuing power of Flaubert's writing. An afterword by Mario Vargas Llosa concludes the volume. The book includes a chronology and suggestions for further reading. ... Read more

Book Description
This exquisite novel tells the story of one of the most compelling heroines in modern literature--Emma Bovary. Unhappily married to a devoted, clumsy provincial doctor, Emma revolts against the ordinariness of her life by pursuing voluptuous dreams of ecstasy and love. But her sensuous and sentimental desires lead her only to suffering corruption and downfall. A brilliant psychological portrait, Madame Bovary searingly depicts the human mind in search of transcendence. Who is Madame Bovary? Flaubert's answer to this question was superb: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." Acclaimed as a masterpiece upon its publication in 1857, the work catapulted Flaubert to the ranks of the world's greatest novelists. ... Read more

Book Description
This exquisite novel tells the story of one of the most compelling heroines in modern literature--Emma Bovary. Unhappily married to a devoted, clumsy provincial doctor, Emma revolts against the ordinariness of her life by pursuing voluptuous dreams of ecstasy and love. But her sensuous and sentimental desires lead her only to suffering corruption and downfall. A brilliant psychological portrait, Madame Bovary searingly depicts the human mind in search of transcendence. Who is Madame Bovary? Flaubert's answer to this question was superb: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." Acclaimed as a masterpiece upon its publication in 1857, the work catapulted Flaubert to the ranks of the world's greatest novelists. ... Read more

Book Description
'Would this misery go on forever? Was there no escape? And yet she was every bit as good as all those other women who led happy lives!' When Emma Rouault marries Charles Bovary she imagines she will pass into the life of luxury and passion that she reads about in sentimental novels and women's magazines.But Charles is a dull country doctor, and provincial life is very different from the romantic excitement for which she yearns. In her quest to realize her dreams she takes a lover, and begins a devastating spiral into deceit and despair.Flaubert's novel scandalized its readers when it was first published in 1857, and it remains unsurpassed in its unveiling of character and society.In this new translation Margaret Mauldon perfectly captures the tone that makes Flaubert's style so distinct and admired. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (182)

great book, lousy edition
print is too small for my wife and myself, we both got used to it but it's probably better to buy a different printing

Remains relevant
The startling impact of this novel published 150 years ago can only be imagined. It's doubtful that a female central character had ever exhibited such self-centeredness, held such disdain for her life and those in it, spent so much time romanticizing and fantasizing about future life with lovers, or sunk to such depths of despair when realities hit home. The themes of the book are hardly irrelevant today: the quick onset of marital unhappiness, the excitement, yet limitations, of infidelity, and the financial consequences of extravagance.

Despite the relevance of those issues, the characterizations are not particularly realistic by modern standards: the characters are overdrawn - excessive. Emma is almost childlike in her profound unhappiness and obsessiveness; her husband Charles is beyond oblivious in failing to perceive Emma's thinking and behavior; and the comical arrogance of various professionals, such as the doctors and the pharmacist, is only exceeded by their ignorance and incompetence.

The book is set in small towns in the French countryside. It's difficult for the modern reader to fully grasp that environment, though the author offers fairly detailed and sophisticated descriptions. In fact, one might want to keep a dictionary handy.

The subject matter of the book is commonplace in the modern novel. But the book is interesting just from the standpoint that a nineteenth century author could produce a book that is so psychologically perceptive concerning marital life. It is considered to be a classic for a reason; it remains worth reading.

A Gem
I agree with the editorial review above that says you could shake this book and nothing would fall out. I am amazed at how much emotion Flaubert can convey in the midst of apparently neutral descriptions of fact. The story is powerfully told, and nothing is wasted.

The book is rather like a longer alternate version of Hedda Gabler. The author's unblinking eye shows you the virtues and flaws of all characters, letting the reader draw his or her own conclusions.

novel of life
I came to Madame Bovary through a perhaps fairly commonplace contemporary window - Julian Barnes's masterful 1984 novel 'Flaubert's Parrot'. Barnes, for those who are unfamiliar with him, is a Francophile English novelist who grabbed me when I was younger and I now read omnivorously. Flaubert's Parrot is a fascinating playful novel meditating on life, art, and especially Flaubert and his life and work, and especially Madame Bovary.

Of course, I was slightly wary of Madame Bovary's massive classic status. It easily holds its own in the pantheon of top five novels ever or something. But to read some of the reviews you might think Emma Bovary was a moderately attractive provincial slapper who got what she deserved.

People who think this clearly have no understanding human psychology. For on a first reading (most novels one reading suffices, but for Madame Bovary it was clear that it demands many subsequent re-readings) it was clear that Flaubert's succes du scandale is perhaps the greatest realist novel ever.

His style is supremely elegant, yet not dated in the way many of his 19th Century contemporaries have become. His subject is the world and its everymen - provincial people, limited in education, with vulgar and at hypocritical mores. His themes are timeless - the disjunction between people's idealised projection of themselves and the reality of their lives, the power dynamics of human relationships, the machinations of the heart, the difficulties of communication between people who live closely knit lives. His characters shine through not as mere holograms but as shining paragons of convincing personalities - the plodding mediocre husband, the frustrated wife, the feckless libertine and (my favourite) the tedious community worthy. These are not cliches but exemplars of so much human existence brought to life by the brilliance of Flaubert's style (he only wrote 25 words a day - slow progress, but well worth it).

Torturous, but good?
I love and I hate this novel. I mean, I don't know what to set my mind to. And it's not that it's stylistically frustrating or confusing. It is the characters, and those men and women only, that force you to wrench the hairs from your head. And I'm sure that's what Flaubert wanted me to do. Charles Bovary esp. is a frustrating character...and I just want to scream at the man and shake him into strength of will. He's a ridiculous person, deprived of any self-development. He's certainly not stupid, but he is certainly naive and ignorant. Madame Bovary herself is even more hair and heart wrenching. A woman oppressed by her society and time, unable to grow and love in peace, is one of the most annoying women in literary history. I'm convinced she must have been mad, at least. She holds no semblance of sanity, practicality or reason. So one loathes her for her ridiculousness but sympathize/empathize with her sexual oppression. And one can only think, "now cmon you could've done it better than that". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Lessons on how to mock against your own opinions ...
"Darwin? Descending from the monkey." You can find many laconical statements like this in the 950 entries of the "Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (commonplaces)". The "Dictionaire de Idées Reçues" has been published as an appendix of Flaubert's final novel "Bouvard et Pécuchet", 1881, one year after the death of Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880).

To the same (Darwinism-) topic the ironical German author Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) noticed: "After the human being comes the monkey (in the system of zoology) - after a broad ravine. But if one should want to organize the animals with regards not on their intellect's but on their bliss and cosiness -- then some people would reach a position under the miller donkeys and hounds."

Lichtenberg's sentences needed more words than Flaubert's. Lichtenberg wrote a little bit didactically and cordially: "The health prefers to see the body dancing more than writing". Flaubert noticed with sarkasm on dancing: "One does not dance today any more; one marches, winds himself etc. "

To the topic "NOVEL" Flaubert made the comment: "Novels ruin the masses. However there are novels for example which are written with the top of a scalpel: Madam Bovary." Here Flaubert becomes trivial, his point of view becomes dull, because he tries to support his own major work. - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) wrote in his comparable "Devil's Dictionary", 1906: "The former art of the novel is everywhere dead already -- unless in Russia where this art is still new. Peace to his ashes -- it still sells well."

Flaubert's (1821-1880) sarcasm in this respect occupies between Lichtenberg (1742-1799) and Bierce (1842-1914) a kind of middle consciousness.

This dictionary makes a parody on the tone of some pompous omniscience other works of his time.

Flaubert probably died of syphilis which he had contracted at his Orient journeys. His satirical statement (with a hidden sort of double irony - back-fighting against the author): "Syphilis? Everyone is more or less affected by..." -- not a quite correct medicine sociologically definition - but one with a high self comfort effect, straightly consoling.

Flaubert makes his jokes on the usual medical dictionaries - and on the fear to die.

Flaubert liked to mock against himself permanently: "ARTISTS. All charlatans. Boast of their disinterestedness (old-fashioned). Express astonishment that they dress like everybody else (old-fashioned). They earn insane amounts, but fritter it all away. Often asked to dine out. A woman artist cannot be anything but a whore."

If you read Flaubert quietly and stopping sometimes to think it over, you have the chance to learn how to make relative your own opinions...

Flaubert's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas
Flaubert's unfinished Dictionaire de Idées Reçues was written as a supplemental appendix to his final novel, Bouchard & Pécuchet.However, the dictionary need not be read in tandem with the novel.It holds its own quite well as a satirical work of social criticism.

Containing some 950 entries, the dictionary slowly skewers the cliché, the "conventional wisdom" and the mental entropy which allows individuals to adopt popular beliefs and misconceptions without thinking.Flaubert loathed ignorance, prejudice and irrationality and he blamed much of his society's problems upon the triumph of "accepted ideas" over individual thought.His antipathy to clichés is unmistakable in his dictionary.

Although the entries are not as wickedly funny as those contained in Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, Flaubert's definitions give the reader plenty of reason to stop and think.The satire of this dictionary is far subtler and sadder than that found in Devil's Dictionary.Take, for instance, this entry: "PAIN, GRIEF.Always has favorable by-products.When genuine, its expression is always subdued" or one on the next page "PROPERTY.One of the foundations of society.More sacred than religion".

Jacques Barzun's masterful translation is nothing short of amazing.It is by no means easy to translate a joke, cliché or play on words.Barzun has successfully done so here.See, for example, "DIANA.Goddess of the chaste (chased)".Barzun deserves equal billing with Flaubert for the English version of this work.Thanks to Barzun, Flaubert's sarcasm wasn't lost in translation.Barzun's footnotes and lengthy introduction are essential to understanding Flaubert's many veiled references to 19th Century French culture and should not be overlooked.

Overall, reading this work was a surprisingly engaging and reflective experience.I picked it up expecting to laugh.Although many of the definitions did bring a smile to my face, I realized just how pervasive "accepted ideas" are in every society and felt a twinge of guilt for my own mindless resort to "accepted ideas".

This review is dedicated to the memory of Bob Zeidler, whose kindness, insight, love of music and way with words continues to inspire.

Amusing to consider how many took it seriously
Like any master of parody, Flaubert doesn't go completely overboard with this satire of the "...For Dummies" books of his day.If we know a bit about Flaubert, we know that his "definitions" in the book are tongue in cheek, but it's actually possible that a member of the French upper middle class in Flaubert's time would have picked this up and thought it a good handy reference book.Priceless, just priceless.

This is great humor, and the accepted ideas it mocks are actually remarkably similar to the accepted ideas of our own time.Flaubert has a way of stating these "facts" that holds them up to the light of his brilliant ridicule.Because a dictionary can contain pretty much anything, Flaubert uses this as a platform to discuss views on art, politics, philosophy, food, animals, and just about everything else.Don't expect, however, to read this and just take its opposite in order to understand Flaubert's mind -- sometimes there is double irony here, and the author is himself ambivalent about the proper "definitions" of the words he lists.

Overall, this is a genuinely funny read, and a useful insight into the petty bourgeois society (similar to our own) Flaubert loved to mock.

The Ideas that Ferment in the Brains of the Brainless
"ARTISTS.All charlatans. Boast of their disinterestedness (old-fashioned). Express astonishment that they dress like everybody else (old-fashioned). They earn insane amounts, but fritter it all away. Oftenasked to dine out. A woman artist cannot be anything but awhore."

Flaubert's satirical reference work, the Dictionnaire desIdées Reçues, reveals in a marvellously condensed form the writer'sattitude toward the French bourgeois society in which he was brought up. Itis a sort of guidebook to19th-century crassness, triteness, pomposity, andirrationalism decked out to look like reason. Clearly Flaubert regarded hisown social class with a mixture of detestation, boredom, and intensefascination. He found both comic and tragic possibilities in this culturalstratum, which he mined relentlessly for the realistic details of hisnovels Madame Bovary, L'éducation sentimentale, and Bouvard et Pécuchet.

In the early 1850s (while at work on Madame Bovary) Flaubert referred inseveral letters to his "sottisier," a compendium of triteopinions, of the ideas that "ferment in the brains of thebrainless." Flaubert never published hisdictionary, although in aletter to his mistress, Louise Colet, he hinted that he intended to do soeventually. Topical dictionaries and digests of knowledge were popular inFrance, especially among the upwardly mobile, who may have fancied thatposession of snippets ofmiscellaneous information conferred a patina oferudition, and made one's dinner-party conversation more sparkling.Flaubert must have enjoyed parodying the entire concept of the"authoritative" reference work; his private compendium wasarranged in alphabetical order, with ludicrous cross-references, secondarydefinitions (which generally contradict the first one), and a tone ofpompous omniscience.

The Dictionary's stock of platitudes servedFlaubert as a sourcebook for the opinions of many characters in the novelsMadame Bovary, L'éducation sentimentale, and Bouvard et Pécuchet.Thiswork, as well as being enjoyable and witty reading for its own sake, is anindispensable artist's eye view of mid-nineteenth century bourgeois mores,and also provides some insight into the paradox the author struggled within his novels: how to create pure art out of pure vulgarity. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
Three Tales offers an excellent introduction to the work of one of the world's greatest novelists. A Simple Heart is set in the Normandy of Flaubert's childhood, while Saint Julian and Herodias draw on medieval myth and the biblical story of John the Baptist for their inspiration. Each of the tales invites comparison with one or other of Flaubert's novels, but they also reveal a fresh and distinctive side to the writers's genius. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

An Introduction to Flaubert
Three tales:One "modern" short-story, one medieval legend, and one historical sketch.Three diverse tales, all colorful and engaging.Reading these tales makes one wish Flaubert had written more.Other reviewers have described each story in more detail so I'll keep my descriptions brief.Beginning with "A Simple Heart", the story of a lonely servant-girl named Felicite who devotes her life to helping a single mother raise her children in a small Normandy village; moving back in time to the medieval era and a capitvating re-telling the legend of "St. Julian Hospitator" who devotes himself to God after being haunted by the thousands of animals he'd hunted and killed as a brash, arrogant youth; far back to the time of Christ, when "Herodias", King Herod's head-strong wife, instigates the beheading of John the Baptist, unintentionally paving the way for Jesus Christ himself; Flaubert has created three "religious" tales that plainly and simply illustrate the status of Christianity at different times, in different places.Some readers of Flaubert find undertones of sarcasm in these tales (more prevelant in "Sentimental Education" for sure), but I really believe he's attempting to be as non-judgmental as possible, simply telling it the way it is; or was.It seems to me that Flaubert's intention with these stories (especially "A Simple Heart" which to me has the most character depth & uniqueness of the three) is to not only showcase his literary skills, but to challenge himself to write about three seemingly unconnected eras and linking them by a common thread.Flaubert's descriptions and details are always of the highest caliber (although sometimes tiresome if one's not used to his style) but ultimately, each tale stands on its own, making "Three Tales" an excellent introduction to one of the most influential, and talented writers of all time.

Three Friendly Short Stories - That Is All
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Three Tales," written 20 years after "Madam Bovery," this from a well known French writer, Gustave Flaubert, like many others, becomes more valued years after his works in French literary importance.

His first story, "Simple Heart," appears to relate a life of both ignorance and acceptance that endures in suffering. Although a life with obstacles, it ends with a somber type of happiness and sense of completeness that elevates loyalty, simplistic ignorance and childlike acceptance that paradoxically ends in futility, the futility of life itself. "Ignorance is both tragic and bliss."

In the seconds story of St. Julian, it contains similarities with the ancient Greek tragedy of King Odepius, told by Sophocles. For in both Flaubert's story of St. Julian and Sophocles story of King Odepius, the tale begins with an oracle that predetermines the character's fate with his subsequent attempts to alter his destiny. Both stories relate how destiny and freedom exist in relative degrees and are thus illusionary in the absolute sense. It's a matter of accepting such destiny and working within the limitations to make the changes that prove human dignity can never be erased. It is the freedom within boundaries that can never be crossed. If I had to compare these two stories, St. Julian is far inferior, but an entertaining read. St. Julian, a killer of a man who becomes the most empathetic, forgiven by God and carried away like Elisha.

The third story, Herodius, is an extension or more detailed, fictious, story of the gospel account of John the Baptist and his subsequent execution.

All three stories are short and flow.

The progression of Christianity -or maybe not-.
Who knows what was going through the mind of this most enigmatic of modern writers, Monsieur Flaubert, when he came up with these stories? Reviewers have speculated about the only common thread that could link these three extremely different tales: Christianity and what it has meant to the people in different historical times. Each tale is completely different in approach and style from the other two.

"A simple heart" is easily the best of the three, in fact a masterpiece of Flaubertism, that is, a subtly ironic and totally dispassionate and realistic account of some provincial character. Felicite is a "simple heart", a woman of miserable origins who spends her life in servitude, contemplating the years go by, each one identical to the next. Felicite has a simple faith in God, unquestioning, unphilosophic, the kind of faith every priest dreams about for his flock. The tale is perfectly written, utterly sad and desolate, but being written by Flaubert, there's a cold irony beneath. Some people think this tale represents Christianity as it came to be in Modern times (XIX century).

"The Legend of St. Julian Hospitator" is a very strange tale of sin and redemption -the Medieval way. Julian is born rich, but he's a cruel man, fond of killing animals. He has no mercy in his heart. After a strange prophecy which he thinks has been fulfilled, Julian flees home and wanders around for many years, until he finds love. But he will sin again and ruin his life for his impiety. The end is a mystic and chilling one. Some people think this tale represents Christianity as lived by people in the Middle Ages.

"Herodias", is a cinematographic tale which tells the story of John the Baptist's beheading. It is picture after picture of action. The central character is Herod, puppet king of Judea. He's having a hard time watching his numerous enemies camped outside his palace, dealing with the Roman envoy, placating the Jewish priests and wondering what to do with the prisoner he has in a dungeon -John. Then everybody shows up and a party begins. There, his lover's daughter, Herodias, will ask for something from him. Some people think this is the social context of the beginnings of Christianity.

Make your own conclusions: is Flaubert giving us a history lesson? Or savagely attacking Christianity and mocking it? Or simply depicting the different ways Christianity has been lived through the centuries? Or none of the above?

Not Flaubert's Best, But Worth Reading Nonetheless
In 1877, twenty years after the publication of "Madame Bovary," Gustave Flaubert published "Three Tales," a thin volume containing the stories "A Simple Heart," "The Legend of St Julian Hospitator" and "Herodias." While Robert Baldick's introduction to the Penguin edition says that "Three Tales" is "still generally regarded as [Flaubert's] most successful and most representative work," it is by no means his best work and does not approach the level of literary genius displayed in "Madame Bovary," "Sentimental Education," or "Bouvard and Pecuchet."

The best of the tales is "A Simple Heart," the story of Felicite, a simple and pious servant girl who "loved her mistress with dog-like devotion and veneration."Orphaned at a young age, she is first taken in by a farmer who, "small as she was, [sent] her to look after the cows in the fields."It is a miserable life:

"She went about in rags, shivering with cold, used to lie flat on the ground to drink water out of the ponds, would be beaten for no reason at all, and was finally turned out of the house for stealing thirty sous, a theft of which she was innocent."

Felicite fortunately enters the service of another farmer who appreciates her devoted, unquestioning work habits.She grows into her adult years working for that farmer and then is retained as servant to Madame Aubain.Felicite's life with Madame Aubain forms the heart of the story, the first sentence of Flaubert's narrative adumbrating the whole: "For half a century the women of Pont-l'Eveque envied Madame Aubain her maidservant Felicite."

Felicite's life is a series of loves: of Theodore, a man whom she falls in love with at the age of eighteen and who leaves her for an older, wealthier woman; of the two children of Madame Aubain, who depart her world in different ways; of a nephew, who leaves on a sailing ship; of a poor old dying man who lives in a pig sty; and, finally, of a green parrot named Loulou.Throughout all these loves, "the years slipped by, each one like the last, with nothing to vary the rhythm of the great festivals:Easter, the Assumption, All Saints' Day."

It is interesting to quote what Flaubert had to say about the end of "A Simple Heart," because it is not entirely clear whether it reflects his true feelings or an ironic denial of irony: "When the parrot dies she has it stuffed, and when she herself comes to die she confuses the parrot with the Holy Ghost. This is not at all ironical as you may suppose, but on the contrary very serious and very sad. I want to move tender hearts to pity and tears, for I am tender-hearted myself."

While readers have struggled with whether the three tales are connected in any way, the confusion of Felicite suggests a Flaubertian irony (or perhaps cynicism) that runs through all the stories: that people who live their lives based on religious belief are living lives based on illusion. In the case of Felicite, it is an illusion that is suggested by the confusion of a stuffed green parrot named Loulou with the Holy Ghost. In the remaining two tales, it is suggested in other ways.

"The Legend of St Julian Hospitator" tells the story of Julian, who grows up in a castle and lives a life marked by violence and mysticism. It is the reworking of a well-worn medieval tale depicted in thirty scenes of a stained-glass window Flaubert saw in Rouen Cathedral. It is also a tale that suggests again that the Christian founding myths are perhaps not what they seem. Thus, Julian's dream of life in the Garden of Eden and of Noah's Ark seems like the dream of a world created by a demiurge, a kind of Gnostic vision of brutality rather than harmony and salvation:

"Sometimes, in a dream, he would see himself like our father Adam in the middle of Paradise, with all the birds and beasts around him; and stretching out his arm, he would put them to death. Or else they would file past him, two by two, according to size, from the elephants and lions down to the stoats and ducks, as they did on the day that they entered Noah's Ark. From the shadow of a cave he would hurl javelins at them which never missed their aim, but others would follow them, there would be no end to the slaughter, and he would wake up with his eyes rolling wildly."

There is, finally, "Herodias," in which Flaubert relates the story of the beheading of John the Baptist at the request of Salome. Like the other two tales, "Herodias" is unsettling to the Christian mythos insofar as it emphasizes verisimilitude and the mundane. Instead of painting a picture of a great historical event, "Herodias" tells a very human tale of politics, jealousy and factionalism in ancient Israel. By doing so, it brings the reader back to the original historical touchstones of writers like Josephus and other contemporaries of Herod, thereby attenuating the centuries of religious mythmaking that followed the real world events. Perhaps this is why no less a critic than Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, commenting on "Three Tales," said that, "these eighty pages teach me more about the circumstances, the origins and the background of Christianity than all of Renan's work."

While not his best work, "Three Tales" nonetheless provides remarkable insight into Flaubert's narrative style and his view of literature. It is a style and a view that consistently departs from romanticism (even though the casual reader perhaps thinks of "Madame Bovary" as a romantic story), using techniques and images that draw meticulous scenes of the real and plumb the psychological depths of the mundane. By all means, read "Madame Bovary" and "Sentimental Education," but don't forget "Three Tales" because it is an equally provocative example of Flaubert's literary endeavor.

Tired intellectual superiority.
The only tale of the three that I enjoyed here was "Herodias," although I must admit that all three are very well-written. In "Herodias" the reader gets to see, or understand, very little of the woman after whom the story is named. Herod is presented from an angle different to that we have become used to, and that in itself is commendable. The terrible problems of governing a small, peripheral state, and having to please powerful enemies, dangerous allies, and fanatic compatriots, appears as the unbearable burden that the king, Herod, deals with. His dealings with enemies camped literally outside his palace, his plotting wife, the Roman envoy, and with John the Baptist, make Herod more human than monstruous. Even if the historical king is not close to Flaubert's representation, this fictional account is superb.

I culd not identify very much with the other two tales. "The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitator" is written in the hagiographical style common to the medieval "lives of the saints" that it copies and, to a great degree, mocks, with traces of influence from other sources, such as Marie de France's "Lais." The story of the cruel and spoiled Julian is interesting, but his conversion from a joyful killer of animals, to a man who believes has killed his mother, to a mercenary, to a jealous man who commits a terrible murder by mistake, and finally to a "living saint" who helps people cross a river on his raft, is not only difficult to swallow, but very obviously told in a very special way by Flaubert (no friend of the Church) in order to send a message. The ending, a bizarre epiphany with strong homoerotic aspects where Christ appears as a very demanding leper who wants Julian naked on his bed and on top of him, may be exactly what Flaubert says it is: a faithful rendition of Julian ascent to Heaven, according to the stained-glass window in the author's "part of the world." But this is most probably Flaubert attempting to be provocative.

And the first tale, "A Simple Heart," laughs out loud at faith once again, since the protagonist "sees" her dead and stuffed parrot as a substitute for Christ welcoming her to the afterlife. This "simple heart" is Félicité, a woman of very limited intelligence that Flaubert uses to poke fun at the unsophisticated faith of the country folk. As an atheist I should have laughed with the author, but I just could not. I can see his undisguised attempt to write, in three tales, a pseudo-history of Christianity, from its beginnings when St. John the Baptist announced the coming of Jesus Christ, to the Middle Ages when hagiography was a very popular literary genre and towns really fought over the privilege of having a Patron Saint, to Flaubert's own time of rational thought and intellectual dismissal of religion. But I found the whole a rather dishonest way to deal with the bother that religion had become in Flaubert's life. "Herodias" is good, but the other two are obvious frontal assaults on the author's chosen enemy. My atheism does not blind me to the evident pamphletary function of "A Simple Heart" and "Julian the Hospitator." They are well-written, but the author's attitude of intellectual superiority is tiresome.

My review corresponds to the Penguin Classics edition of 1961, and the previous reviewer is right: the translator, and author of the Introduction, is Robert Baldick, not Walter J. Cobb. The Introduction is informative and good, even if I cannot agree with Baldick's positive evaluation of these "Three Tales." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

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.

Best Travel Journal Book Ever
Kerouac isn't qualified to hold Flaubert's pen.
This is the real deal. From Christendom to the Orient Flaubert sails and records his thoughts, observations and indulengences in his usual excellent prose.
A must read.

Orientalism
In 1849 Gustave Flaubert was twenty eight.He had an air of athletic vigor.He was the son of a doctor.He had always written.At this point he had finished THE TEMPTATION OF SAINT ANTHONY.Friends suggested he use a story known to him, perhaps through his father, that became the basis for MADAME BOUVARY.

Maxime Du Camp accompanied Gustave to Egypt.France had maintained a controlling political interest in Egypt.Flaubert wrote that in Egypt everyone with clean clothes beats everyone with dirty clothes.Europeans were called Franks.

He wrote that the desert began at the gates of Alexandria.It is suggested that the very act of keeping a travel diary moved Flaubert from being a Romantic to becoming a Realist.There was a sunrise.They saw from the top of pyramids the valley of the Nile being bathed in mist.

The young men stared at the Sphinx.They visited the Coptic Church in Old Cairo.There were jugglers and acrobats and those very feared persons, snake charmers.Maxime Du Camp busied himself with photography throughout the trip.They saw dervishes.Flaubert described the water of the Nile.It was yellow and carried soil.

They took a trip down the Nile.They passed Luxor.The mountains were dark indigo.They arrived at Thebes.They saw towns whose buildings were made of dried mud.They saw and described dancing in their writings.They traveled to Assuan.Du Camp's photographic record of temples became famous.Flaubert reported to his mother that there always seemed to be a temple buried up to its shoulders in sand.

From Luxor to Karnak the great plain looked like an ocean.One's first impression of Karnak was that it was a place of giants.They went to the Red Sea at Koseir.Flaubert found the boats terrifying and was pleased that he did not have to use one.He thought that they carried the plague.

Flaubert's impressions of Egypt returned to him when he wrote SALAMMBO according to Du Camp.It seemed to Du Camp that Flaubert disdained the journey and looked at nothing.On the contrary, Egypt gave Flaubert his first comprehensive view of colors.

This is an elegant account of a writer's response to an alien culture.The book consists of journal entries and letters of Flaubert, writings of Du Camp, notes of the editor, and pictures.All in all it is a most interesting compilation.