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Amazon.co.uk Review
Few modern novelists have been able to entertain and shock their readers in equal proportions quite as successfully as the author of Madame Bovary, the subject of Geoffrey Wall's Flaubert: A Life. Flaubert's famous heroine stands alongside Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Tess Durbeyfield as among the most brilliant creations of the golden age of the great novel. Yet Madame Bovary skirted the outer limits of bourgeois sexual morality with perhaps more dare and flair than other writers, and consequently, seems as familiar now as it ever has. As Geoffrey Wall shows in his well-researched and engagingly written book, Flaubert himself epitomised both the wilder side and the contradictions of French bourgeois literary life in the middle of the 19th century. The pampered bachelor second son of a surgeon, he kept homes in Rouen and Paris, yet worked himself into chronic illness by his devotion to his art. He treated some women--notably his niece, Caroline, and George Sand, the novelist, as his confidantes and equals--yet cruised predator-like through the brothels and fleshpots of Paris and north Africa. A progressive in matters moral, he nonetheless repudiated the republicans of 1848 and moved effortlessly in the salons of Louis Napoleon's imperial regime. Wall is excellent on all this biographical detail, but rather at the expense of a proper appreciation of Flaubert's oeuvre. It takes 200 pages to get to Madame Bovary, and even then the analysis of the novel is rather brief, leaving this reader anxious to leave behind the extraordinary Gustave Flaubert with his boils, syphilis and debts, but determined to read his work all over again.--Miles Taylor. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
'Extraordinarily accomplished... one of the best biographies of this or any other year.' Sunday Telegraph; 'The clearest, most satisfyingly biographical account of Flaubert to date.' Independent
Who could be more qualified to write a new biography of Gustave Flaubert than the gifted translator of Madame Bovary? Geoffrey Wall re-examines Flaubert's sources of inspiration and method of work, giving us an insight not only into the writer's life and oeuvre but also into the world he inhabited. Born in Rouen, where his father practised as a surgeon, Flaubert spent most of his life there, a bachelor living with his mother and dedicated to his art. Friends persuaded him to venture abroad and he toured Egypt and the Middle East, storing up details for possible novels. Later, when literary notoriety and success gave him access to salons and palaces in Paris, he took a set of rooms in the capital. Valuing masculine friendship, scabrous masculine pleasures and disrespectful, sometimes misogynous conversation, he was, on the whole, a man's man. The list of his friends and acquaintances reads like the index to a history of French nineteenth century literature: the Goncourt brothers, Victor Hugo, Sainte Beuve, George Sand, Theophile Gautier... As a lover, he was less satisfactory. In his notes on Flaubert's circle, Wall dismisses his correspondent, Louise Collet, as an impossible person, but she must have been sorely provoked by a lover who carefully rationed his visits to her and pleaded composition or his mother's apron strings as reasons for remaining selfishly remote. A fan of the Marquis de Sade, Flaubert could be very cruel. Quoting from letters and journals, Wall gives us an intimate picture of a man obsessed with style, frequently ill, torn between an imperative need for peace and quiet and a mischievous relish for the contradictions and follies of society life. He was acutely conscious of the ridiculous both in himself and in others, his cynicism becoming more misanthropic with age and infirmity. This is an impressively scholarly but most readable book. (Kirkus UK)
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Few modern novelists have been able to entertain and shock their readers in equal proportions quite as successfully as the author of Madame Bovary, the subject of Geoffrey Wall's Flaubert: A Life. Flaubert's famous heroine stands alongside Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Tess Durbeyfield as among the most brilliant creations of the golden age of the great novel. Yet Madame Bovary skirted the outer limits of bourgeois sexual morality with perhaps more dare and flair than other writers, and consequently, seems as familiar now as it ever has. As Geoffrey Wall shows in his well-researched and engagingly written book, Flaubert himself epitomised both the wilder side and the contradictions of French bourgeois literary life in the middle of the 19th century. The pampered bachelor second son of a surgeon, he kept homes in Rouen and Paris, yet worked himself into chronic illness by his devotion to his art. He treated some women--notably his niece, Caroline, and George Sand, the novelist, as his confidantes and equals--yet cruised predator-like through the brothels and fleshpots of Paris and north Africa. A progressive in matters moral, he nonetheless repudiated the republicans of 1848 and moved effortlessly in the salons of Louis Napoleon's imperial regime. Wall is excellent on all this biographical detail, but rather at the expense of a proper appreciation of Flaubert's oeuvre. It takes 200 pages to get to Madame Bovary, and even then the analysis of the novel is rather brief, leaving this reader anxious to leave behind the extraordinary Gustave Flaubert with his boils, syphilis and debts, but determined to read his work all over again.--Miles Taylor. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
'Extraordinarily accomplished... one of the best biographies of this or any other year.' Sunday Telegraph; 'The clearest, most satisfyingly biographical account of Flaubert to date.' Independent
Who could be more qualified to write a new biography of Gustave Flaubert than the gifted translator of Madame Bovary? Geoffrey Wall re-examines Flaubert's sources of inspiration and method of work, giving us an insight not only into the writer's life and oeuvre but also into the world he inhabited. Born in Rouen, where his father practised as a surgeon, Flaubert spent most of his life there, a bachelor living with his mother and dedicated to his art. Friends persuaded him to venture abroad and he toured Egypt and the Middle East, storing up details for possible novels. Later, when literary notoriety and success gave him access to salons and palaces in Paris, he took a set of rooms in the capital. Valuing masculine friendship, scabrous masculine pleasures and disrespectful, sometimes misogynous conversation, he was, on the whole, a man's man. The list of his friends and acquaintances reads like the index to a history of French nineteenth century literature: the Goncourt brothers, Victor Hugo, Sainte Beuve, George Sand, Theophile Gautier... As a lover, he was less satisfactory. In his notes on Flaubert's circle, Wall dismisses his correspondent, Louise Collet, as an impossible person, but she must have been sorely provoked by a lover who carefully rationed his visits to her and pleaded composition or his mother's apron strings as reasons for remaining selfishly remote. A fan of the Marquis de Sade, Flaubert could be very cruel. Quoting from letters and journals, Wall gives us an intimate picture of a man obsessed with style, frequently ill, torn between an imperative need for peace and quiet and a mischievous relish for the contradictions and follies of society life. He was acutely conscious of the ridiculous both in himself and in others, his cynicism becoming more misanthropic with age and infirmity. This is an impressively scholarly but most readable book. (Kirkus UK)
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The Cambridge Companion to Flaubert
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