Gustave Flaubert

Reviews / Votes

Green's crisp, readable account offers a concise overview of Flaubert's travels, friendships and novels, with chapters devoted to each of the three major works, Madame Bovary, Salammbo and Sentimental Edu-cation. Of these, Salammbo in particular - following Green's influential evaluation of the novel in her earlier Flaubert and the Historical Novel - can be read as a critique of the social divisions and increasing influence of the bourgeois in Second Empire France . . . Citing the critic James Wood - "Flaubert changed literature forever" - Green positions her subject not only as a writer of novels about the past, but as one whose work has altered the course of literary history * Times Literary Supplement * Green captures in just 175 pages the essence of one of the most iconoclastic and important figures in literary history. Published in the excellent "Critical Lives" series, this richly researched, compact, even minimalist study offers an intimate portrait of a volatile, melancholy man haunted by traumatic experiences, extravagant tastes, and lifelong self-doubt . . . Green reveals Flaubert's intellectual and emotional life in short, telling anecdotes about his travels, relationships with family and friends, and the unremitting, often overwhelming struggles he faced when writing. Some three-dozen judiciously selected images complete this magnificently concise portrait of a complicated man who never got his wish "to be forgotten, to be left in peace, never to be talked about" but might just have read this biography with approval. Essential * Choice * This is a brisk, compact, and pleasurably lucid life-and-works narrative addressed to the general reader, traversing the known ground in properly consecutive fashion. Beautifully produced, printed on heavy paper - the kind that does justice to images - the book presents Flaubert in the most favourable terms. The account of the contemporary reception of Salammbo is expertly detailed. We get a sympathetic account of the grinding distress - physical, financial, and emotional - of Flaubert's final years. There is a nicely eclectic epilogue which catalogues Flaubert's posthumous international influence on the art of the novel * French Studies * This slim book, consistent with the constraints of Reaktion's "Critical Lives" series, is a remarkable achievement. Acknowledging that her subject has unsurprisingly attracted many biographers, Anne Green modestly adds that "no biography, however, can hope to capture fully Flaubert's defiantly original imagination or the paradoxes of his iconoclastic, sensitive, irascible, humorous, combative and loyal nature". Notwithstanding such a caveat, hers goes a considerable way towards accommodating these multiple and often contradictory dimensions of his life and art. The challenges of brevity are all the greater for the specialist (and Green is certainly that) who knows too much. But an intimate familiarity with Flaubert's voluminous correspondence allows Green to isolate, within a broadly chronological narrative, the key moments of the writer's existence . . . "BOOK. Always too long, whatever it is", Flaubert noted. Not this one * Journal of European Studies *