Salammbô by Gustave Flaubert (1862, some editions title it Salambo)

Gustave Flaubert (1821 to 1880) wrote two of the greatest novels of all time.  In 1857 he published his ice cold work of perfection Madame Bovary and in 1869 Sentimental Education, worthy of comparison with the greatest novels in the world.  In between he wrote Salammbô  (1862) which is the weirdest 19th century novel I have yet read.  It is set in the third century BC at the start of the first Punic Wars.  On one side was the North African city state of Carthage, on the other a besieging Roman army.

The book is pretty much one long descriptions of battles, fights, soldiers of all sorts and exotic maidens.  It is full of blood, torture and sexual fantasies played out.  The descriptive power and imagination  of Flaubert as he produced endless descriptions of the multi-ethnic army assembled by the Romans to take Carthage are marvelous. The women are fantasy figures of the standard sort.   If you like descriptions of torture and creative methods of execution you will find a lot to like in this book.  This book sold very well, probably Flaubert in his descriptions of exotic women pushed the limits in 1862.  

The title character Salammbô is a She Who Must Be Obeyed and Worhshipped for her Beauty straight out of your fantasies figure.  There is little or no character development.   You don't care who wins or loses you just keep going thinking ok a literary genius wrote it so I guess I should finish it.  She is depicted as in love with a very large snake.  A video game was based on it and a movie.

It was fun to read just to see how "whacked out" Flaubert would get.  My post read research says he spent years researching the history from the best sources of the time.   

My wild guess is that  if this book were not written by an ultra-high status author, very few would read it, fewer than those who do even now.  It was fun, it got a bit boring at times but the sheer imagination of Flaubert made me glad to have read Salammbô.  It is a "boy's fantasy book".  It could be castigated as Orientalism run wild if you wanted to tear it down.  My advice of course is to read his big books first, then read them again, then venture on with his other novels.  I also have read his The Temptations of Saint Anthony and it was iñdeed very strange.

 

Mel u

Ambrosia Bousweau 

A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert (1869, translated by Donald Parmée)

Some thoughts on my third reading of A Sentimental Education .  Dandys and all that!

"He traveled.

  Chilly adventures under canvas; dreary mail-packets; the dizzy kaleidoscope of landscapes and ruins; the bitter taste of friendships nipped in the bud:  such was the pattern of his life.

   He came home.

   He went into society..desire had lost its edge, the very springs of feeling had tried up.  his intellectual ambitions had also faded.  Years passed, and he came to terms with his mental stagnation and the numbness in his heart". From A Sentimental Education, part three, chapter six.

"The Dandy who begins with a taste for the heroic soon funds that there is no theater in which to exact heroism and he or she is driven back in the studio and drawing room, there to bemoan his frustration.  Perhaps the most finished example of the type in 19th century literature is Flaubert's Frederic Moureau, a figure which arises in the interregnum between a lost ancien regime and the replacement by a new code" - from Inventing Ireland -  Literature of the Modern Nation by Declan Kiberd.

As I read A Sentimental Education for the third time i had the thoughts of Declan Kiberd as a kind of guide.  As one reads on in the novel when the politcal turmoil in the country turns to violence in the streets in Paris, I thought could perceive a correspondence of the life history of Frederic Moureau to that of the country, both go through great turmoil to no real result.  The education of both teaches them to withdraw, to cultivate the self.

I am very interested in the figure of the dandy in literature.   I see him emerging in France in The Comedie Humaine to perhaps achieve apogee in Proust.  As mentioned by Susan Sontag in her "Notes on Camp", the dandy is related to camp somehow but dandys are not camp, dandys are not fops.  Camp and homosexuality are culturally linked and there are complex connections with this to the dandy.A dandy is a highly cultivated person, man or woman, often culturally refined to a level beyond the understanding of all but a few people.  The dandy plays a large role in Japanese literature, between the wars.  I have posted a lot on the role of the dandy in the short stories of Desmond Hogan.    Many dandys, as are the men in A Sentimental Education, are very much into prostitutes .  A knowledge of prostitutes and brothels  can be cultivated much like a knowledge of Opera or Chinese Cermamics.  Think for a bit on the person of James Bosewell.  

I laughed out loud at the hilarious duel scene and greatly relished the depiction of the fighting in the streets of Paris.  The food scenes were mouthwatering.  

From this point on, this is a rewritten mostly for style post from 2013.

Gustave Flaubert's (1821 to 1880) Madame Bovary is on everyone's list of best novels ever written, including mine.    To me Madame Bovary is an ice cold work of perfection in which one can only stand in awe.  I also think the only reason A Sentimental Education is not on all lists is that list makers fear two books by one author is somehow "unfair".

I first read Flaubert's  A Sentimental Education about four years ago.

Ford Madox Ford  purportedly said  one could not consider themself an educated person until you had read it fourteen times.   

  In very well done introduction to the Oxford Classics edition Parmee flirts with the idea of saying A Sentimental Education is better than War and Peace .  I really liked A Sentimental Education however I think one does not just like Madame Bovary any more than one would like the Taj Mahal or Guernica.

Here are some of the things I like about this book.   I like the character development of the central figure, Frederic Moreau.   The work is really full of great descriptions of life in Paris.  I enjoyed the accounts of political turmoil.  The food sounds great and there are some interesting romances along the way.  Some people, including Henry James, see this as a huge step down from Madame Bovary.  Aside from the fact that almost every novel is a huge step down from Madame Bovary I think one should first read it then this work.   The characters in A Sentimental Education are very self absorbed and the development of the education of Frederic is slow.   I liked the novel a lot as a whole but I loved the last chapter when we flash to Frederic as an older man, still pursuing a life of pleasure.   It was a lot of fun to hear of his visit in company of one of his close friends to a brothel and how it ruined their reputations when word got out.  Later the two men talk about how these times were the best of their lives.

Mel u
The Reading Life

The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert

The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert (1872)

Gustave Flaubert (1821 to 1880-France) spent thirty years working on The Temptation of Saint Anthony before the final version was published in 1872, longer than any of his other works.    His Madame Bovary (1857) is nearly always listed among the ten best novels of all times.   I personally prefer his Sentimental Education (1869).   His few short stories show a very different side of Flaubert and are must reading for lovers of that form.   

As I began to work my way through The Temptation of Saint Anthony (as translated by M. Walter Dunne) my first reaction was "this is really a weird book" by a man truly obsessed with what he is writing about.   

It was inspired by a painting Flaubert saw of the temptations suffered by a third century saint, an anchorite, who lived in complete isolation on a mountain top in Egypt.   Written to a large extent as if it were a play, it depicts the fleshly temptations and the intellectual doubts that the devil sent to Anthony one night in the form of an incredible dream.   

There are  a lot of historical and religious references in this book.   Flaubert, a Catholic, had his own issues and temptations and I think this book stems in part from that.   

I really enjoyed The Temptations of Saint Anthony.   It is not what you might expect of the author of Madame Bovary.   I found it a wonderful almost compulsive work that I am glad I have now read.   As I began to the book my first thought was "this is really a weird book".  As I ended it my thought was "wow, weirder than it was at the start".   

I hope in 2012 to reread Sentimental Education and read for the first time his novel set in Carthage, Salammbo.

Please share with us your experience with Flaubert, beyond Madame Bovary.   

Mel u

"The Dance of Death" by Gustave Flaubert

"The Dance of Death" by Gustave Flaubert (1838, 12 pages)

Recently I decided I wanted to read more short stories.   For me Dailylit.com is a great way to do this.  They have maybe 200 classic short stories on line to select from (all free).   They will send you in e mail or RSS about 2 to 5 minutes (by their estimates most will read faster) worth of a work.   You will get the next installment next day or you can request it be sent at once.  If you do not like the work once you get into it you just cancel.    As a perhaps negative, the translated works are in older now in the public domain editions.   You can also read  lots of books here but personally I do not really want to read longer works in my PC but the short story versions work fine.  (Dailylit.com -there are many read on line type web pages, of course-is especially valuable for readers in places where there basically are no public libraries).     

Gustave Flaubert (1821 to 1880)   published his most famous work, Madame Bovary  in 1857 at age 37.   When I saw I could read a work of Flaubert's at age 17 I was intrigued.   "Dance of Death"  (translator not given) is almost a prose poem.  It is in part the lament of death over the cruel task God has given him.   Death engages in a dialog with Satan.    Death suggested Satan has the more enviable lot as his work will one day be done and he will have rest.    Nero then joins the conversation as one of the finest minions of Satan.      "Dance of Death" does read like the work of a very bookish young man in love with his own intelligence and beginning to feel his creative powers.   You can feel that he no doubt enjoyed the possible shocking effect of this story in Catholic France in the 1830s.  (As I read the laments of Death over his role in the world I was brought to mind that Death is the narrator of The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, one of the very first books I blogged on when I began The Reading Life in July of last year)

The tone of the work and the topics seem to most resemble Salammbô, (1862-  set in Carthage in the 3rd century BC.)   In "The Dance of Death" you can also begin to see the erotic elements that will emerge in Flaubert's work.  Here is an interesting section of the conversation between Death and Satan

I must be everywhere. The precious metals flow, the diamonds glitter, and men's names resound at my command. I whisper in the ears of women, of poets, and of statesmen, words of love, of glory, of ambition. With Messalina and Nero, at Paris and at Babylon, within the self-same moment do I dwell. Let a new island be discovered, I fly to it ere man can set foot there; though it be but a rock encircled by the sea, I am there in advance of men who will dispute for its possession. I lounge, at the same instant, on a courtesan's couch and on the perfumed beds of emperors. Hatred and envy, pride and wrath, pour from my lips in simultaneous utterance. By night and day I work. While men ate burning Christians, I luxuriate voluptuously in baths perfumed with roses; I race in chariots; yield to deep despair; or boast aloud in pride.

In this we can see the perhaps overly florid prose of a young writer and of a young man imaging an exotic world of women, places, and sins he can only see, so far in his life, in his mind.    "Dance of Death"  is worth the 10 or 20 minutes of your time to read it.   It will let you see a great artist trying to feel his power.   It is in part a curiosity read just to see what the author of Madame Bovary  (a lead contender for best novel ever and a very strong bid for best French novel) could write at 17, 20 years before Madame Bovary.   Dailylit.com also has Flaubert's Three Tales on line.   The three short stories in this work are mature masterpieces and should be your second Flaubert.

Mel U