Flaubert: A Life - Softcover

Wall, Geoffrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571212395 ISBN 13: 9780571212392

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2002

Synopsis

In this, the first biography of Flaubert to be written for many years, Geoffrey Wall brilliantly recreates the life and times of a writer of immeasurable talent and influence - a writer who wrote to within an inch of his life and in the process left a body of work that stands comparison with the greatest writers of the age.

About this title

Review:

Few modern novelists have been able to entertain and shock their readers in equal proportions quite as successfully as the author of Madame Bovary, the subject of Geoffrey Wall's Flaubert: A Life. Flaubert's famous heroine stands alongside Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Tess Durbeyfield as among the most brilliant creations of the golden age of the great novel. Yet Madame Bovary skirted the outer limits of bourgeois sexual morality with perhaps more dare and flair than other writers, and consequently, seems as familiar now as it ever has. As Geoffrey Wall shows in his well-researched and engagingly written book, Flaubert himself epitomised both the wilder side and the contradictions of French bourgeois literary life in the middle of the 19th century. The pampered bachelor second son of a surgeon, he kept homes in Rouen and Paris, yet worked himself into chronic illness by his devotion to his art. He treated some women--notably his niece, Caroline, and George Sand, the novelist, as his confidantes and equals--yet cruised predator-like through the brothels and fleshpots of Paris and north Africa. A progressive in matters moral, he nonetheless repudiated the republicans of 1848 and moved effortlessly in the salons of Louis Napoleon's imperial regime. Wall is excellent on all this biographical detail, but rather at the expense of a proper appreciation of Flaubert's oeuvre. It takes 200 pages to get to Madame Bovary, and even then the analysis of the novel is rather brief, leaving this reader anxious to leave behind the extraordinary Gustave Flaubert with his boils, syphilis and debts, but determined to read his work all over again.--Miles Taylor.

Review:

'Extraordinarily accomplished... one of the best biographies of this or any other year.' Sunday Telegraph; 'The clearest, most satisfyingly biographical account of Flaubert to date.' Independent

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0571212395
• ISBN 13: 9780571212392
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432