- Paperback: 328 pages
- Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press; New Second edition (1 Nov 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1564783936
- ISBN-13: 978-1564783936
- Product Dimensions: 20.5 x 14.1 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 219,494 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review
Among all the works of this brilliant writer Bouvard and Pécuchet is definitely the deepest the most thorough the broadest. . . . It is the Tower of Babel of the sciences where all the diverse, opposing and absolute doctrines each having its own language demonstrate the powerlessness of effort, the vanity of affirmation, and the ever eternal misery of everything. --Guy de Maupassant
Flaubert inspires in me an affection that I don't feel for any other writer. --Jean Echenoz
In Bouvard and Pécuchet Flaubert created an encyclopedia of the sciences in a way that emphasizes all the flaws and failures of knowledge and at the same time he did so in a way that breaks the forms of literature itself. --Claudine Cohen Alliage
Flaubert inspires in me an affection that I don't feel for any other writer. --Jean Echenoz
In Bouvard and Pécuchet Flaubert created an encyclopedia of the sciences in a way that emphasizes all the flaws and failures of knowledge and at the same time he did so in a way that breaks the forms of literature itself. --Claudine Cohen Alliage
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.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"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...
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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3 reviews
26 of 30 people found the following review helpful
Flaubert's brilliant unfinished novel in an excellent new edition
22 Jan 2006
Format:Paperback
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.
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.
3 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Bouvard and Pecuchet (Kindle edition)
23 Jun 2009
Format: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.
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.
9 of 51 people found the following review helpful
The worst book I've ever read.
12 Aug 2007
Format:Paperback
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.
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