Sentimental Education (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

Gustave Flaubert (Author), Robert Baldick (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 30, 1964

Based on Flaubert's own youthful passion for an older woman, Sentimental Education was described by its author as "the moral history of the men of my generation." It follows the amorous adventures of Frederic Moreau, a law student who, returning home to Normandy from Paris, notices Mme Arnoux, a slender, dark woman several years older than himself. It is the beginning of an infatuation that will last a lifetime. He befriends her husband, an influential businessman, and as their paths cross and re-cross over the years, Mme Arnoux remains the constant, unattainable love of Moreau's life. Blending love story, historical authenticity, and satire, Sentimental Education is one of the great French novels of the nineteenth century.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Novel by Gustave Flaubert, published in French in 1869 as L'Education sentimentale: Histoire d'un jeune homme. The protagonist, Frederic Moreau, and his beloved, Mme Arnoux, are based on Flaubert's youthful infatuation with an older married woman. Frederic's puppy love for Mme Arnoux is at first steadfast and idealistic, and she remains faithful to her rather frivolous husband. Frederic's love ends in disillusionment, as do the subsequent passions of his life. His youthful ambitions lead to failure and boredom, and his idealistic views of social progress are disappointed by reality. Among the novel's most remarkable qualities is Flaubert's vivid and faithful presentation of its social and political setting, including the Revolution of 1848, the republic that followed, and the mood of the French people amid the era's many changes. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

About the Author

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), the younger son of a provincial doctor, briefly studied law before devoting himself to writing, with limited success during his lifetime. After the publication of Madame Bovary in 1857, he was prosecuted for offending public morals.

Geoffrey Wall teaches at the University of York, translated Flaubert's Selected Letters and Madame Bovary for Penguin Classics, and is the author of Flaubert: A Life.

Robert Baldick translated many volumes from the French for Penguin Classics. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books (November 30, 1964)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140441417
• ISBN-13: 978-0140441413
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,474,101 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

93 of 104 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Of special value, September 20, 2004

By 

[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sentimental Education (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

There is a special value in "Sentimental Education" that puts it among the highest class of novels. Better than Thackery, better than Stendhal, better than Austen, better than Balzac, better than Eliot, it offers something that Dickens or Melville, for all their virtues, do not provide. Here is a portrayal of a society, where the author looks deeply and thoroughly--and does not flinch. The contrast with Thackeray, whose sarcasms and coldness cannot hide a fundamentally conventional mind, is obvious. But there is also not the self-satisfied amusement with its own proprieties that we see in Austen, or the something for everyone that we see in Trollope, or the sentimentality so obvious in Dickens, or the way the captain goes on and on in "Billy Budd" saying he has no choice but to execute the fundamentally innocent Billy, or the fundamentally abstract obsession with unity that we see in Eliot. Here we see a story of a venial, petty monarchy, the hopes and illusions of the second republic, and its suppression and replacement by a new Napoleonic regime. If many of the friends of Frederic Moreau are shallow and complacent in their "democratic" phase, that does not alter their fact that their opportunism and moral corruption is a gruesome business. It does not remove the shock on reading the death of the one truly decent person in the book, murdered by a dead ringer for David Horowitz.

This is not a popular book in the English speaking world. Frederic Moreau does not have the dignity and moral weight that a moralistic criticism demands. Much of his time is spent wondering how to seduce Madame Arnoux or how he should snag "The General." Of course, French 19th century fiction is distinguished from its Victorian counterpart by a greater degree of sexual realism. But the point of the book is not to discuss Moreau's apparently aimless life. Instead the point is how there are alternatives that would give his life meaning, whether it be love, artistic creation, professional achievement, politics and a genuine interest in civil society. Moreau fails to achieve some of these because he does not have the energy to get them, he fails to achieve others because he runs out of time, he fails others because he is betrayed by people he trusts, and he fails others because otherwhelming forces remove options from the tables. Moreau does not fail simply because he is weak, he fails for reasons that most people fail. And in that sense Flaubert shows an exemplary realism.

And of course, Flaubert is the master stylist. Who can forget his description of the wealthy opportunist Dambeuse "worshipping Authority so fevrently he would have paid for the privilege of selling himself." There is the perfectly controlled realism: we do not have the cheap tricks and garish effects of middlebrow writers. But we still have the poetic and the imaginiative: "the smoke of a railway engine stretched out in a horizontal line, like a gigantic ostrich feather who tip kept blowing away," "The women wore brightly coloured dresses with long waists, and, sitting on the tiered seats in the stands, they looked like great banks of flowers, flecked with black here and there by the dark clothes of the men." "the warm breeze from the plains brought whiffs of lavender together with the smell of tar from a boat behind the lock." Moreau's passion for Madame Arnoux may be weak, but it is more real and more convincing than all but a handful of romances in 19th century fiction. The political scenes present a picture that has almost no equals: a left chattering fashionable platitudes, but with a leaven of genuine indignation, a right who covers itself in hypocrisy and lies until it can find the moment to strike. And of course there is the ending, a discussion of nostalgia and lost hopes that many English critics find sordid, but is one of the most heartbreaking in all fiction.

There is a complaint among people who should know better, like Peter Gay and James Wood, that Flaubert shows a certain unnecessary bitterness. This shows a certain ignorance of history. After all Flaubert wrote one of the great novels in world literature and instead of being praised by his own government he was put on trial for obscenity. His contempt did not come lightly. One could contrast it with Naipaul's, whose solution to the mediocrities of Trinidad was to move to a very different country and to be generously praised, by some for his art, and by others for appeasing conservative consciences. Certainly Naipaul's path is not an alternative available to most of his countrymen. Nor was Flaubert's distaste for contemporary life simply the result of the particular nastiness only confined to French politics. There were things equally vile or worse in Trollope's Ireland or in the end of Reconstruction of Henry James. That they did not perceive the same kind of foulness surely is a mark on the limits of their imagination, and a point in Flaubert's favor. Sentimentality is often described as unearned emotion. But in Sentimental Education, every emotion is well deserved.

25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Masterpiece, April 22, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Sentimental Education (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

"The Sentimental Education" is an absolutely brilliant novel. That Flaubert's most famous and most highly regarded novel is "Madame Bovary" is astounding to me. That novel has many failings, whereas "Education" has none. The writing is the best you'll ever read, the story is touching and deep and rich, the charcters wonderfully drawn. And the last paragraph in the novel is both hilarious and endearing, and makes it a novel that is brilliant to the very last word. I can not recommend this novel highly enough. It is somewhat of an overlooked masterpiece (overshadowed by the lesser "Bovary"). One critic said that the reason "Forrest Gump" (the movie version) did so well was that "it dealt wonderfully with unrequited love, something we can all relate to." Well, "Education" is about unrequited love, and it deals with it with 100 times the power that "Forrest Gump" did. The novel also includes a revolution and the Parisian social world. "THE SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION" HAS EVERYTHING!!! When Woody Allen listed the "things that make me happy to live," one of the things he listed was "`The Sentimental Education' by Gustave Flaubert."

24 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Possibly a work of genius, but very strange., September 9, 2001

By 

GeoX "GeoX" (Men...Of...The...Sea!) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sentimental Education (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

Nothing in Madame Bovary would have prepared me for this: A Sentimental Education is the most aimless, undramatic (intentionally so, mind) novel I've ever read. A mediocre young man comes to the Big City and has several on-and-off affairs with a number of mediocre women. And that's about it, really. While there are in fact hints of drama here and there, it's all incidental; there's no buildup to anything greater. Even the 1848 revolution seems distant and somehow irrelevant to the novel's lazy meanderings. All of this is intentional, of course; Flaubert was clearly striving for as close an imitation of life, devoid of any of the artifice that most authors employ, as possible. It is, I suppose, the ultimate example of the French naturalism movement: Zola and Maupassant, great writers that they were, really had too strong dramatic instincts to ever write as dispassionately as this.

If this makes the novel sound terribly dull, it's really not: admittedly, it's not the most gripping book I've ever read, but Frederic, feckless though he is, does manage to be somewhat sympathetic, and the secondary characters are, by and large, well-realized--the working class hero type Dussardier stands out in particular. And the ending is oddly poignant. One problem I did have was Flaubert's infuriating habit of mentioning characters by name without having previously introduced them, making for some highly disorienting passages. However, even this is navigable after you've gotten used to it.

I do recommend A Sentimental Education to you. I really can't decide whether or not I like it more than Madame Bovary, but it's certainly an intriguing work. Flaubert may ultimately not be one of nineteenth century France's greatest writers (let's face it: he's no Balzac or Zola), but that doesn't mean he deserves to be lost in the crowd.