Bouvard and Pecuchet with The Dictionary of Received Ideas (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

Gustave Flaubert (Author), A. J. Krailsheimer (Translator, Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 24, 1976

Bouvard and Pecuchet are two Chaplinesque copy-clerks who meet on a park bench in Paris. Following an unexpected inheritence, they decide to give up their jobs and explore the world of ideas.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation)

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (June 24, 1976)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140443207
• ISBN-13: 978-0140443202
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #337,318 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sharp satire, fuzzy edition, October 10, 2001

By 

Mark Scroggins (Boca Raton, FL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bouvard and Pecuchet with The Dictionary of Received Ideas (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

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. The "Dictionary of Received Ideas," which is included in this edition, is sort of a "Devil's Dictionary" of middle-class stupidities; astonishingly, almost all of its satirical bite still holds true. I dock this Penguin edition one star because it doesn't have any notes, which would have made Flaubert's nineteenth-century context far more easily graspable.

26 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential reading for the 80's generation-disco desperates, December 29, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Kingston, Ontario) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bouvard and Pecuchet with The Dictionary of Received Ideas (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

Although he never finished this book, it remains even in translation, a perfect guide to the perils of bourgeois ambitions. Two hapless bank clerks use a sudden inheritance to dabble disastrously in all the current fashions, with hilarious and mordant results. Includes a "dictionary of received ideas" which should be required reading for all Americans. I read it at least once a year, out loud, and am much the better for the release. Buy it for everyone you know, and see if you can then watch Jimmy Stewart or Martha Stewart without throwing up.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Odd but interesting book, December 2, 2005

By 

magellan (Santa Clara, CA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Bouvard and Pecuchet with The Dictionary of Received Ideas (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

Flaubert supposedly read something like 1000 books to do the research for this novel and apparently had an almost photographic memory. Bouvard and Pecuchet proceed to plow through the entire corpus of human knowledge, ostensibly to become more learned and true Renaissance men, now that they are men of leisure.

You'd think this would seem a laudable goal for a French intellectual like Flaubert, but he seems to be make fun of such superficial or perhaps self-educated learning, and perhaps of human knowledge in general. Flaubert seems to presage the 20th century's weariness with arid and purely ivory-tower scholarship that perhaps has led to the anti-science sentiments we see today, the rise of fuzzy-minded, muddy, and fallacious philosophies like New Age, and perhaps even movements like Creationism's antipathy toward evolution and Darwin.

Perhaps to Flaubert, since there is no end to learning, and all human knowledge, or at least an individual human's learning is finite, there are no real truths and all knowledge is essentially relative and inconstant and incomplete. Certainly Bouvard and Pecuchet's projects are always doomed to failure and are never completed.

I'm not sure what else in the way of profound meaning I can glean from this book, but it does seem to sound a cautionary warning or perhaps cynical note on the dangers of superficial learning or perhaps even too much learning. Perhaps Flaubert is also saying life is not something to observe and analyze, but to experience instead. That would be consistent with the beliefs of the Realists, since the French Realist authors like him pioneered the idea of intensively observing and researching the common people and the dregs of society that they often wrote about, as in Zola's Nana, for example, who was a prostitute.