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Flaubert: A Life, by Geoffrey Wall
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The life and times of the great French novelist
A blond giant of a man with green eyes and a resonant actor's voice, Gustave Flaubert, perhaps the finest French writer of the nineteenth century, lived quietly in the provinces with his widowed mother, composing his incomparable novels at a rate of five words an hour. He detested his respectable neighbors, and they, in turn, helped to ensure his infamy as a writer of immoral books. Geoffrey Wall's remarkable new biography weaves together the inner dramas of Flaubert's provincial life with the social intrigues of his regular escapes to Paris, where he became a friend to Turgenev and was praised by the emperor, and the flamboyant excitements of his travels throughout the Mediterranean, on which he kept company with courtesans, acrobats, gypsies, and simpletons.
Flaubert's contradictory experiences nurtured his peerless novels and stories, and Wall's dynamic interpretation of them gives us a new understanding of his sometimes pitiable, always unforgettable characters: an Egyptian hermit tormented by voluptuous visions, a melancholy doctor's wife eating arsenic to escape debt and despair, an old country woman who worships a stuffed parrot.
Wall's is the first full-fledged modern biography of this immeasurably talented and influential artist. Flaubert brilliantly re-creates the life and times of a writer who wrote to within an inch of his life and whose importance will never diminish.
- Sales Rank: #3275951 in Books
- Published on: 2002-05-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.31" h x 6.44" w x 9.36" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 432 pages
From Publishers Weekly
The great French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) has a reputation as an ivory-towered, art-for-art's-sake writer, but there was another Flaubert, one Wall inclines toward in this briskly readable and welcome new biography. This Flaubert visible in his letters to his friend and publisher Maxime Du Camp, his difficult lover Louise Colet and his peer (and rival) George Sand was mercurial, passionate, vivacious, even Rabelaisian. Wall (who translated Madame Bovary and other works for Penguin Classics), like Flaubert himself, downplays the Realist writer for the Romantic who appreciated Victor Hugo (and de Sade). At the outset of his career, Flaubert was enjoying himself in Paris, neglecting his legal studies and writing his first novel, which would become A Sentimental Education. His first nervous attack, which occurred while visiting his family in provincial Rouen and which Wall diagnoses as epilepsy, not only cut off Flaubert's legal career and curtailed his love of travel, but it partly accounted for his sedentary reclusiveness. Though Flaubert quarantined himself for years at his family home to write, Wall gives full attention to the enterprising episodes in which the writer broke free of his self-imposed routine: his extensive travels in Egypt and his later socializing in Paris's Second Empire salons. While the novelist famously detested the bourgeoisie, politics and modernity, Wall argues that his father's eminently bourgeois success as a doctor shadowed his younger son's work habits and even his aesthetic, and that the events of the Revolution in 1848 and the Commune were barely checked on the margins of Flaubert's life and art. Wall's first book, this was short-listed for England's prestigious Whitbread Award last year. 16 pages of b&w illus.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Wall has translated many of Flaubert's famed novels, but this is his first whirl at writing a book himself. Surprisingly little has appeared on Flaubert, so this is a welcome treat.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* His previous work in translating Madame Bovary into contemporary English has well prepared Wall to write a compelling biography of its author, Gustave Flaubert, one that probes deeply into the mystery of how taut fiction emerges from a tangled life. To be sure, Wall spares us none of the tangles. We see how the consummate craftsman in prose relished the sordid ugliness of the slaughterhouse, how the devotee of high culture succumbed to the bestial charms of de Sade, how the friend of progressive icons (Sand and Turgenev) raged against the common rabble of humanity, and how the relentless enemy of the bourgeoisie invoked the conventions of middle-class respectability to bully a hapless niece. But none of these contradictions disqualified Flaubert from producing supernal art--perhaps because he viewed the artist as a special creature (a monster, he sometimes remarked) who transcends the natural world he observes. Readers marvel, for example, at how Flaubert imaginatively transforms his frustrated and fractured love for Louise Colet into the seamless artistry of his greatest novel. Similarly, we wonder at how Flaubert makes his intense financial and medical trials serve as the crucible in which to forge his final dark mythologies (La Legende de Saint Julien l'hospitalier and Herodias). Acute as a guide to both the life and the literature, Wall has put all students of Flaubert in his debt. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
A lovely piece of work
By Christopher Bram
Flaubert was a difficult man: arrogant, anal, irascible, a lonely bear of a fellow with a special gift for making enemies. Yet Geoffrey Wall manages to make him human and sympathetic. This is a first-rate biography, quick, smart, dramatic and often very funny. The MADAME BOVARY years might be handled better by Francis Steegmuller in his excellent double bio of the author and his masterpiece, but Wall's account of Flaubert's later career cannot be improved on. Giving special life to those chapters is his account of Flaubert's friendship with the immensely likable George Sand. If she can connect with this prickly man, why can't the rest of us? Their exchange of letters is one of the great literary dialogues and Wall tells this story beautifully.
I began this book disliking the man despite my love of his novels. I finished it feeling fond of the man, identifying with his faults, and wanting reread everything.
21 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Biographer not up to the job
By A Customer
This is a disappointing biography of Flaubert. It discusses neither Flaubert's intellectual development nor his books in any depth. The author makes much of the silliest and must vulgar aspects of Flaubert's personality (as if he felt a special affinity for these topics) while skirting any serious aesthetic or literary issues. Flaubert was certainly a peculiar, irritating man, but Wall, like most celebrity biographers of our day, stresses these aspects to try to squeeze some cheap laughs and prurient snickers from his subject matter. Flaubert's strange love affair with Louise Colet is narrated so sophomorically that it's practically unreadable. The book ends abruptly, summarizing Flaubert's last few years in a few paragraphs, as if the biographer couldn't stand it anymore himself. The best thing about the book is the sprinkling of excerpts from Flaubert's letters. The worst thing is the biographer's low-brow, childish, psychobabbling voice trying to make sense of a literary genius he had no business trying to write a life of. It's as if Seinfeld tried to write a book about Homer.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Best Recent Biography
By reading man
One of the other reviewers of this biography wrote:
"This is a disappointing biography of Flaubert. It discusses neither Flaubert's intellectual development nor his books in any depth. The author makes much of the silliest and must vulgar aspects of Flaubert's personality (as if he felt a special affinity for these topics) while skirting any serious aesthetic or literary issues. Flaubert was certainly a peculiar, irritating man, but Wall, like most celebrity biographers of our day, stresses these aspects to try to squeeze some cheap laughs and prurient snickers from his subject matter. Flaubert's strange love affair with Louise Colet is narrated so sophomorically that it's practically unreadable. The book ends abruptly, summarizing Flaubert's last few years in a few paragraphs, as if the biographer couldn't stand it anymore himself. The best thing about the book is the sprinkling of excerpts from Flaubert's letters. The worst thing is the biographer's low-brow, childish, psychobabbling voice trying to make sense of a literary genius he had no business trying to write a life of. It's as if Seinfeld tried to write a book about Homer."
A better simile would be: it's as if this reviewer read an excellent biography then trashed it because it's neither literary criticism nor a "deep" psychological study.
Is the reviewer aware that Sartre wrote a massive uncompleted study of Flaubert that would satisfy his dubious wish for "highbrow" (as opposed to Wall's "low-brow") psychobabble. Not that Sartre is a reliable guide to Flaubert, you understand: he's really an obsessed leftist who believes his warped understanding of Freud and Marx is the skeleton key to his victims, most notably Genet, whom he reduced to a bloodless abstraction in his soi-disant "introduction" to that writer's collected works. (His book on Baudelaire at least has the benefit of brevity, if not clarity.)
I see the biographer's task as giving an account of the events of his subject's life, and even if that includes the books he wrote as the main events, then he can hardly be expected to write detachable essays in depth about them. I challenge this reviewer to explain why the brief accounts Wall gives of Flaubert's novels is inadequate to the job he undertook--namely, to write a biography of moderate length, rather than a gargantuan meditation on his subject a la Sartre.
As for making much of the most vulgar aspects of Flaubert's character ... It would be very hard to write an accurate biography about a man who adored DeSade's writings, who described sadistic characters and scenes with relish in SALAMMBO, and who, judging from his correspondence, was obsessed with anality, the cruder aspects of sexuality, and every form of feculence. Flaubert was vulgar and his biography had better make that clear unless he wants to deny reality.
If Wall tries to get "cheap laughs" at any point in this biography, he comes a cropper. Of course, he does nothing of the sort, and to call his account of Flaubert's dubious relationship with Louise Colet "sophomoric" is to misunderstand that Flaubert's contempt for Colet, whose naivete was pathetic, duplicates the kinds of relationships many sophomores have. You can't make a profound romantic reality out of a trivial encounter that was basically about erogenous zones.
I do agree that Wall doesn't do justice to Flaubert's later years, and his dislike of BOUVARD ET PECUCHET apparently explains his neglect of the final masterpiece.
However, Wall's book is arguably the best recent biography of Flaubert, much better than Enid Starkie's wordy volumes or Lottman's badly written account or Brown's or Bart's. Ignore the negative review I've quoted and read Wall if you're interested in Flaubert
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