Flaubert
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"Je porte en moi la mélancolie des races barbares, avec ses instincts de migrations et ses dégoûts innés de la vie, qui leur faisait quitter leur pays, pour se quitter eux-mêmes." Flaubert
Peut-on lâcher son siècle ? Le détester, oui, lui préférer une Antiquité imaginaire, certes, mais Flaubert est entraîné dans les tourbillons du temps. Son œuvre portera cette double marque : le rêve carthaginois d'un monde flamboyant à jamais disparu et la peinture vengeresse du siècle de Monsieur Prudhomme et du pharmacien Homais. Michel Winock porte un regard d'historien sur cette vie tout entière vouée à la littérature.
Son dégoût proclamé de la vie, Flaubert ne l'a transcendé ni par l'expérience amoureuse, ni par la foi en Dieu, ni par quelque idéal politique, mais par la religion de l'Art, dont il fut un pèlerin absolu.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Winock's unremarkable though nicely detailed and elegantly translated life of Gustave Flaubert adds nothing new to the ground already covered better and more entertainingly by Frederick Brown's Flaubert: A Biography and Geoffrey Wall's Flaubert: A Life. In straightforward fashion, Winock narrates Flaubert's life from his early years living on the grounds of a hospital (he was the son of a renowned surgeon) and his youthful decision to become a writer ("to write, is to take hold of the world") to his amorous on-again-off-again relationship with Louise Colet, his intellectual friendship with George Sand, his fascination with Egypt, and his brush with financial ruin. Winock offers close readings of Flaubert's writings: in Madame Bovary, "Flaubert had turned the trivial into art"; in Salammb , "he satisfied his need for beauty with horrifying and monstrous scenes." Winock suggests that Flaubert's Sentimental Education is perhaps the novelist's true masterpiece because, in presenting the lives of ordinary people, it escaped "the ruins of the heroic novel a genre to which Madame Bovary still belonged." Winock's serviceable biography paints a familiar portrait of the "hermit of Croisset" as the artist who elevated the art of writing above the fray of the modern world, becoming the "most modern writer of his time."
