Customer Reviews

Bouvard and Pécuchet

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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.

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.

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.