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Flaubert
Bouvard and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù with The Dictionary of Received Ideas
Bouvard and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù are two Chaplinesque copy-clerks who meet on a park bench in Paris. Following an unexpected inheritance, they decide to give up their jobs and explore the world of ideas.
In this, his last novel, unfinished on his death in 1880, Flaubert attempted to encompass his lifelong preoccupation with bourgeois stupidity and his disgust at the banalities of intellectual life in France. Into it he poured all his love of detail, his delight in the life of the mind, his despair of human nature, and his pleasure in passionate friendship. The result is “a kind of encyclopedia made into farce,� wholly grotesque and wholly original, in the spirit of Gargantua and Pantagruel , Don Quixote or Ulysses .
In this, his last novel, unfinished on his death in 1880, Flaubert attempted to encompass his lifelong preoccupation with bourgeois stupidity and his disgust at the banalities of intellectual life in France. Into it he poured all his love of detail, his delight in the life of the mind, his despair of human nature, and his pleasure in passionate friendship. The result is “a kind of encyclopedia made into farce,� wholly grotesque and wholly original, in the spirit of Gargantua and Pantagruel , Don Quixote or Ulysses .
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1911
27 people are currently reading
750 people want to read
About the author
Gustave Flaubert
2,230Ìýbooks3,737ÌýfollowersGustave Flaubert was a French novelist. He has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country and abroad. According to the literary theorist Kornelije Kvas, "in Flaubert, realism strives for formal perfection, so the presentation of reality tends to be neutral, emphasizing the values and importance of style as an objective method of presenting reality". He is known especially for his debut novel Madame Bovary (1857), his Correspondence, and his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 43 reviews
October 18, 2016
Anyone familiar with Flaubert's writing, if asked to name his best novel, would almost certainly say . But Flaubert believed, or at least intended, this work, Bouvard et Pecuchet, to be his masterpiece. I say intended because it was left unfinished and unpublished at the time of his death in 1880. It was published in 1881 and he would have been disappointed to know that it was received with little fanfare by the critics.
The story is about Francois Bouvard and Juste Pecuchet, two French copy clerks who meet one summer day and become instant and fast friends. And after Bouvard inherits a fortune, they decide to retire to the French countryside where, with their leisure, they begin a new life of intellectual study on every subject they can think of. Not just study, but physically examining, experimenting, and practicing everything from farming to literature, from chemistry to politics, from love to religion. Of course they are very amateurish in their endeavors which leads to failure and exasperation every time.
Their story is told in a series of comedic episodes reminding me somewhat of , and even though it is not written in "stream of consciousness", just listening to the random thoughts in the minds of these two characters, puts me in mind of Joyce's . While this book comes nowhere near the level of Madam Bovary, Don Quixote, or Ulysses, it nevertheless is very entertaining. It certainly gave me a few chuckles and I was happy to make the acquaintance of Bouvard and Pecuchet.
The story is about Francois Bouvard and Juste Pecuchet, two French copy clerks who meet one summer day and become instant and fast friends. And after Bouvard inherits a fortune, they decide to retire to the French countryside where, with their leisure, they begin a new life of intellectual study on every subject they can think of. Not just study, but physically examining, experimenting, and practicing everything from farming to literature, from chemistry to politics, from love to religion. Of course they are very amateurish in their endeavors which leads to failure and exasperation every time.
Their story is told in a series of comedic episodes reminding me somewhat of , and even though it is not written in "stream of consciousness", just listening to the random thoughts in the minds of these two characters, puts me in mind of Joyce's . While this book comes nowhere near the level of Madam Bovary, Don Quixote, or Ulysses, it nevertheless is very entertaining. It certainly gave me a few chuckles and I was happy to make the acquaintance of Bouvard and Pecuchet.
May 16, 2024
I left my reading about ten pages before the end of this incomplete novel. It ends arbitrarily, so on a whim, or a plan, I ended it. I haven’t given the last pages another thought. I read Flaubert’s ‘plan� that comes afterwards. But that fittingly too is incomplete and in keeping with the non-‘end�.
At the beginning, I thought Bouvard and Pecuchet would wander around Paris together. But that lasted only for a few pages. I followed where they went on google maps to no end, either. I thought I might be reading the earliest version of Samuel Beckett's Mercier et Camier. But I was wrong. B & P moved to the country and physically stayed put. Intellectually, they sort of move in circles.
They pursue human knowledge systems. Though in reality that is a grandiose description of their idiotic pursuits, which are grandiose in approach, too. They try everything, philosophy, palaeontology, medicine, etc etc. Their approach starts in one place and abruptly changes, they are incomplete learners. Their entire experience reminds me of spending an evening searching for something on the web, only to end up in dark places, or places I didn’t expect. No knowledge gained, but much time lost.
My favourite is agriculture. I could see the disasters and read with one hand covering my eyes peaking through the gaps in my fingers at this cerebral slapstick.
The tone is comic, or heightened to focus on the folly of B & Ps mission. Along the way, we know some of their ideas are stupid, only because we know they are false - as history has told us. They argue regularly with the town’s curé when their inclination goes to matters of religion. They espouse nonsense they just read, and half understood, from books. But the curé’s answers are just as daft anyway. Imagine people espousing stupid ideas to each other across an intellectual abyss. Sounds familiar. Sounds modern.
Some of the writing is wonderful. Here is a comic moment following an argument in the rain:
The water ran along his spine into to his boots, his ears, his eyes, despite the peak of his Amoros cap, the curé picked up the skirts of his cassock with one arm, baring his legs, and the points of his tricorn gushed water over his shoulders like gargoyles in a cathedral
Arguments come and go, started enthusiastically, easily derailed. Little time is spent mastering a system of knowledge:
‘Oh! You are sophist!� And Pecuchet was so vexed he sulked for three days� They both confessed that they were tired of philosophers. So many systems only confuse you. Metaphysics is useless. One can live without it.
But their quest goes on regardless. Another human knowledge system is pursued yet again. And then again. They must attempt it at least. Do they die? I’ll never know. I didn’t finish, nor did Flaubert. But I can imagine the two of them dancing their way to heaven, having refuted it. Perhaps only changing dance steps along the way.
November 24, 2024
Œuvre inachevée de Flaubert puisqu’en cours d’écriture lorsqu’il était malade, avant de mourir.
C’est avant tout une rencontre entre Bouvard et Pecuchet qui exercent le même métier (copiste), ont les mêmes habitudes, s’intéressent aux même choses et aspirent aux mêmes rêves.
C’est deux vieux garçons vont prendre une décision étonnante pour l’époque, vivre ensemble !
-> ce qu’on pourrait appeler aujourd’hui une BROMANCE
C’est naturellement qu’ensemble ils vont se lancer dans l’étude scrupuleuse de TOUS les centres d’intérêts possibles et inimaginables comme l’agriculture, arboriculture, distillerie, conserverie, chimie, médecine, astronomie, gymnastique, zoologie, archéologie, géologie, antiquité, histoire, biographie, littérature�
Malheureusement pour eux et heureusement pour nous, tout ce qu’ils vont entreprendre fera un four, un échec cuisant.
Flaubert signe ici une œuvre pour dénoncer la bêtise.
À vouloir tout savoir et s’en venter on arrive des fois à des situations dangereuses mais souvent à des farces ridicules et drôles.
C’est avant tout une rencontre entre Bouvard et Pecuchet qui exercent le même métier (copiste), ont les mêmes habitudes, s’intéressent aux même choses et aspirent aux mêmes rêves.
C’est deux vieux garçons vont prendre une décision étonnante pour l’époque, vivre ensemble !
-> ce qu’on pourrait appeler aujourd’hui une BROMANCE
C’est naturellement qu’ensemble ils vont se lancer dans l’étude scrupuleuse de TOUS les centres d’intérêts possibles et inimaginables comme l’agriculture, arboriculture, distillerie, conserverie, chimie, médecine, astronomie, gymnastique, zoologie, archéologie, géologie, antiquité, histoire, biographie, littérature�
Malheureusement pour eux et heureusement pour nous, tout ce qu’ils vont entreprendre fera un four, un échec cuisant.
Flaubert signe ici une œuvre pour dénoncer la bêtise.
À vouloir tout savoir et s’en venter on arrive des fois à des situations dangereuses mais souvent à des farces ridicules et drôles.
June 13, 2018
Of all of Flaubert's works the one that most appealed to me was Bouvard and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù, a story about two clerks who embark on a mission to understand everything. It was published posthumously in 1881; it was an unfinished work even though Flaubert had been working on it for nearly ten years. An earlier draft from 1863 exists which has what I feel is a better title, The Two Woodlice (Les Deux Cloportes). The two woodlice, Bouvard and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù, are single, middle-aged clerks who happen to meet and strike up a friendship one day in 1838. The meeting takes place on the first page of the book and has a Beckettian feel to it.
This all happens in the first chapter. In the second chapter Bouvard and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù get used to their new surroundings and try to find out how to survive in the country. Although those around them offer advice both men dive into books and magazines to determine the best way to run their farm. They take up every hare-brained scheme that they come across, which often involves paying a lot of money for equipment, and ignore the advice of others. This sets the pattern of the whole book whereby Bouvard and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù decide they need to know about something, they then do some research and try to put in practice whatever they come across, fail, then move on to their next obsession. For example, Bouvard has read that bleeding his bullocks will fatten them up, they end up dying from it; he decides to make beer from germander (mint family) leaves which cause intestinal problems of those that try it; they decide to have a pear orchard but all the trees die. They try making jam, pickling vegetables and making bread, but fail. They then get a still and try to produce liqueurs, but after narrowly escaping death when the still explodes, ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù says 'Perhaps it is because we don't know any chemistry!' And so chapter three is about their attempts to understand chemistry then anatomy, medicine etc. Each subsequent chapter is taken up with their search for knowledge on a variety of subjects, always with the same lack of success. Initially Bouvard and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù are optimists, always convinced that they will be successful but by the time they get to study philosophy in chapter eight they have finally had enough and decide to commit suicide on Christmas Day but then upon seeing a midnight mass procession they turn to God. The book doesn't end there as they end up adopting two children and then try to find the best way to educate them. Although the book is unfinished Flaubert left a plan which indicates that they end up getting a double-sided desk made so that they can go back to their original work as copyists.
Bouvard and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù is certainly a strange book and one that takes a bit of getting used to as there is no real narrative just the cycle of attempt and failure. Flaubert tries to connect the chapters to give it some overall structure but this can be rather tenuous. Although a lot of the episodes were humorous I felt that Flaubert was holding back on the humour. I wondered about his aims in writing such a book and most of what I read about it suggests that he was trying to show how pointless most knowledge is. But for me the problem is with Bouvard's and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù's approach to knowledge; they seem to be uncritical consumers of all knowledge regardless of its source, they seem unable to learn from their mistakes, they are merely dabblers and dilettantes and seem unwilling to listen to others' advice. For example the fact that they can't grow pear trees is not because the knowledge to do so is not there but it is because they are fools who are incapable of processing the information. After all, it is possible to grow pear trees. That there is a lot of useless, wrong or dangerous information around is apparent to the modern-day internet user and the ability to sift out all this crap from the relevant and useful information is a daily task that we all have to perform—sadly there are still many modern-day Bouvards and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ùs around.
In the end the main problem with it is that it's a bit too repetitive. I felt that the last couple of chapters became a bit more focused as their route from philosophy to religion then to education had more of a narrative drive than the earlier progression through literature, drama, politics and love. It was quite a fun book to read and it was a shame Flaubert didn't finish it but I feel that he should have paid more attention to Turgenev's advice.
ÌýÌýÌýTwo men appeared.They quickly become good friends, meeting each other at lunch or after work to go for a walk, sharing meals and conversation. They are, however, quite different: Bouvard is a widower, he has curly hair, he is rotund and is quite sociable; whereas ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù is a bachelor, has black hair and is rather morose. One day Bouvard is notified that he has inherited his uncle's fortune—this uncle is actually Bouvard's natural father. Bouvard decides to wait until his retirement before moving to the country at Chavignolles. There is no question of ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù being left behind and he is invited to share Bouvard's good fortune.
ÌýÌýÌýOne came from the Bastille, the other from the Jardin des Plantes. The taller of the two, in a linen costume, walked with his hat pushed back, waistcoat undone and cravat in hand. The smaller one, whose body was enveloped in a brown frock-coat, had a peaked cap on his bent head.
ÌýÌýÌýWhen they came to the middle of the boulevard they both sat down at the same moment on the same seat.
ÌýÌýÌýEach took off his hat to mop his brow and put it beside him; and the smaller man noticed, written inside his neighbour's hat, Bouvard; while the latter easily made out the word ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù, in the cap belonging to the individual in the frock-coat.
ÌýÌýÌý'Well, well,' he said, 'we both had the same idea, writing our names inside our headgear.'
ÌýÌýÌý'My word, yes! Someone might take mine at the office.'
ÌýÌýÌý'The same with me, I work in an office too.'
ÌýÌýÌýThen they studied each other.
This all happens in the first chapter. In the second chapter Bouvard and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù get used to their new surroundings and try to find out how to survive in the country. Although those around them offer advice both men dive into books and magazines to determine the best way to run their farm. They take up every hare-brained scheme that they come across, which often involves paying a lot of money for equipment, and ignore the advice of others. This sets the pattern of the whole book whereby Bouvard and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù decide they need to know about something, they then do some research and try to put in practice whatever they come across, fail, then move on to their next obsession. For example, Bouvard has read that bleeding his bullocks will fatten them up, they end up dying from it; he decides to make beer from germander (mint family) leaves which cause intestinal problems of those that try it; they decide to have a pear orchard but all the trees die. They try making jam, pickling vegetables and making bread, but fail. They then get a still and try to produce liqueurs, but after narrowly escaping death when the still explodes, ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù says 'Perhaps it is because we don't know any chemistry!' And so chapter three is about their attempts to understand chemistry then anatomy, medicine etc. Each subsequent chapter is taken up with their search for knowledge on a variety of subjects, always with the same lack of success. Initially Bouvard and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù are optimists, always convinced that they will be successful but by the time they get to study philosophy in chapter eight they have finally had enough and decide to commit suicide on Christmas Day but then upon seeing a midnight mass procession they turn to God. The book doesn't end there as they end up adopting two children and then try to find the best way to educate them. Although the book is unfinished Flaubert left a plan which indicates that they end up getting a double-sided desk made so that they can go back to their original work as copyists.
Bouvard and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù is certainly a strange book and one that takes a bit of getting used to as there is no real narrative just the cycle of attempt and failure. Flaubert tries to connect the chapters to give it some overall structure but this can be rather tenuous. Although a lot of the episodes were humorous I felt that Flaubert was holding back on the humour. I wondered about his aims in writing such a book and most of what I read about it suggests that he was trying to show how pointless most knowledge is. But for me the problem is with Bouvard's and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù's approach to knowledge; they seem to be uncritical consumers of all knowledge regardless of its source, they seem unable to learn from their mistakes, they are merely dabblers and dilettantes and seem unwilling to listen to others' advice. For example the fact that they can't grow pear trees is not because the knowledge to do so is not there but it is because they are fools who are incapable of processing the information. After all, it is possible to grow pear trees. That there is a lot of useless, wrong or dangerous information around is apparent to the modern-day internet user and the ability to sift out all this crap from the relevant and useful information is a daily task that we all have to perform—sadly there are still many modern-day Bouvards and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ùs around.
However, all this reading had disturbed their brains.I had a quick look in Frederick Brown's biography of Flaubert, Flaubert: A Life, to see if I could uncover a bit more about Flaubert's intentions in writing this book and what exactly drove him to continue with it for so long. It was interesting to find that Turgenev warned him from making it too heavy and suggested the story lent itself to a satire. Flaubert ignored Turgenev's advice. In a letter to his sister, dated 6th June 1877, he wrote 'At times, the immense scope of this book stuns me. What will come of it? I only hope I'm not deceiving myself into writing something goofy rather than sublime. No, I think not! Something tells me I'm on the right path! But it will be one or the other.' I think it is more goofy than sublime, but I don't see that as a negative criticism as I believe that Flaubert should have played up the 'goofiness' even more.
In the end the main problem with it is that it's a bit too repetitive. I felt that the last couple of chapters became a bit more focused as their route from philosophy to religion then to education had more of a narrative drive than the earlier progression through literature, drama, politics and love. It was quite a fun book to read and it was a shame Flaubert didn't finish it but I feel that he should have paid more attention to Turgenev's advice.
July 30, 2015
Flaubert's final (unfinished) novel is sui generis. A comic duo of simple-minded copyists attempt to scale the heights of the rural French bourgeois in a series of satirical episodes. One of their notable early schemes involves the construction of a "Romantic" scene in their backyard, complete with a lightning-blasted tree and an Etruscan tomb. Later, they briefly became barbers in order to study phrenology. It's sort of like Laurel & Hardy meet Didi & Gogo. A very unique, funny book.
April 5, 2017
This is my favourite Flaubert because he pokes fun at intelligencia. Two educted men retire to the countryside to become farmers employing a book as their guide and having no experience what soever in agrarian life.
May 19, 2013
I'm simply not enjoying this, so setting it aside. Perhaps I have too literal a mind and there is supposed to be some silliness that I just don't get.
March 9, 2024
I have wanted to read this book for a long time. It is the book that Flaubert was working on when he died. He almost finished it. Two clerks explore various fields of knowledge and endeavors including education, philosophy, agriculture and science. Everything they do ends in disaster.
November 19, 2018
; or, an encyclopedia of pseuds
March 13, 2020
Kept on going long after the point was made, but still entertaining. Glad The Dictionary of Received Ideas is included; great entries here such as "ANT Model to hold up to a spendthrift. Suggested the idea of savings banks" and "DUNGEON Always horrible... Nobody has ever come across a delightful one."
December 17, 2012
Using a random number generator, this is book is the first chosen from reading list of 216 books. I call it Satan's Reading List because 6x6x6=216. After all, Lucifer does mean 'light bearer' and was the first to offer humanity fruit from the tree of knowledge. Of course, that story doesn't end so well...
which is a perfect introduction to 'Bouvard and Pecuchet.' I find it eerie that Satan's Reading List should begin with a work whose major theme is the futility of accumulated knowledge. It's as if the random number generator (or whatever force controls such things) is issuing me a warning - hinting that I should refocus on more practical pursuits like woodworking or finding a job that pays enough to live on. But I persevered.
The book itself should have been a better read. I am a particular sucker for books about friendship, but Flaubert glosses over the friendship in such a way that you feel very little for these two lifetime companions. There are funny parts, and one particularly moving part about a poor schoolmaster being forced against his principles by the local clergy, but on the whole you really get a sense of the unfinished (perhaps unfinishable)nature of this novel.
which is a perfect introduction to 'Bouvard and Pecuchet.' I find it eerie that Satan's Reading List should begin with a work whose major theme is the futility of accumulated knowledge. It's as if the random number generator (or whatever force controls such things) is issuing me a warning - hinting that I should refocus on more practical pursuits like woodworking or finding a job that pays enough to live on. But I persevered.
The book itself should have been a better read. I am a particular sucker for books about friendship, but Flaubert glosses over the friendship in such a way that you feel very little for these two lifetime companions. There are funny parts, and one particularly moving part about a poor schoolmaster being forced against his principles by the local clergy, but on the whole you really get a sense of the unfinished (perhaps unfinishable)nature of this novel.
October 21, 2009
This is an unfinished novel but I don't think that is going to matter. It is a picaresque romp through the buffoonery of the bourgois mind of 19th cent. France -- all the prejudices and obedience to blind authorities. These two clerks meet and become fast friends. One of them inherits a fortune and then they set out to make it in various professions. They invariably fail due to their insistence on remaining well-read but stubbornly ignorant. This is a very funny book.
December 31, 2008
This is about two hapless Parisian fellows who retire to the country and become omnivorous auto-didacts to the distress of all their neighbors. It's wry, funny, touching, and very very French. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
July 28, 2017
Probably the Flaubert book you should read once you've read all the others, this novel concerns two clerks who become friends then retire after one of them comes into a substantial inheritance. Moving to the country, they occupy themselves by attempting to improve their education and understanding of the world around them. They investigate agriculture, philosophy, religion, phrenology, occultism and just about everything else. The comedy comes from their repeated failures in putting what they learn into practice or to find answers which satisfy them, but rather than simple figures of fun they are sympathetic figures to be admired for trying. They have the occasional success, but it only sets them up for a further failure and they become outcasts regarded with suspicion by the rest of their community, most of whom are hypocrites who question nothing as long as it does not conflict with their own self-interest. An eccentric, complex, episodic work full of the obsession with detail one expects from Flaubert and written with his usual timeless style. Be warned, though, the story will not be most people's idea of a 'plot' and this is the kind of book I'm sure many readers would soon lose patience with. I liked it a lot but it did take me a while to get through it!
August 6, 2024
Bouvart et ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù sont deux vieux colocs qui changent de hobby comme s'ils étaient des tiktokeurs neuroatypiques. Curieux, ils élargissement leurs horizons en apprenant les sciences, s'essaient à l'art, la gymnastique, la médecine... Supposé que c'est un roman sur la médiocrité, mais en lisant, je me demandais souvent c'est qui le cave? Bouvart et ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù qui ont soif de savoir, quitte à faire des erreurs? Ou bien les autres bourgeois et villageois bornés qui ont toujours tout fait de la même manière, qui se fient à leur "savoir" sans le questionner?
Bref des belles réflexions et c'est quand même drôle, même si c'est un peu long.
Bref des belles réflexions et c'est quand même drôle, même si c'est un peu long.
October 20, 2024
Two dolts run into a bit of money, quit their mundane jobs, and, as men of leisure, retire to the countryside to try on various lifestyles. The results are at first farcical, but as the book progresses, a poignancy is introduced, a desperation, flying both men into the face of the establishment and their own mortality. This is a paeon to friendship, aging, and a stab at the mindlessness of conformity and small-mindedness. Though the book is unfinished, a plan for the ending is included. (As is a brief dictionary of idiocies, cliches, and sarcasms.) My first Flaubert; he’s a bit of a missing link in the whole pomo literature chain.
September 19, 2018
Bouvard and Pecuchet are Parisian copy-clerks who become friends. An unexpected inheritance allows them to retire to the country and turn their hands to whatever they feel like. Dabbling in agriculture, archaeology, gardening, chemistry, writing, philosophy and history, they go from one enthusiasm to the next once they find their book-learned knowledge quickly reaches its limit. Humorous rather than hilarious, these fish-out-of-water dilettantes could still very easily be updated to a modern sit-com.
October 28, 2018
With all this buffoonery, I expected it to be more comedic. Perhaps it was, but my sense of humor is too modern. And perhaps I was too sympathetic to their search for a purpose in life: it was hard to see B&P as anything other than sad-sack dilettantes, surrounded by hicks and schemers.
Nonetheless, the lack of a "masterstroke" is not because Flaubert isn't a master, but because he died before finishing the fine stippling. The Dictionary of Received Ideas is a gas, though, and kicks sand on the gentry in a way that's far more entertaining.
Nonetheless, the lack of a "masterstroke" is not because Flaubert isn't a master, but because he died before finishing the fine stippling. The Dictionary of Received Ideas is a gas, though, and kicks sand on the gentry in a way that's far more entertaining.
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July 17, 2012Philip Roth has argued that if one takes more than two weeks to read a novel, one hasn't really read the novel. I don't know if Roth would allow an extra week or two for Don Quixote, War and Peace or Finnegans Wake but I suspect he wouldn't as he's pretty old and set in his ways at this point. In any case, under that definition, I haven't really read Bouvard and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù. It's taken me almost a year to finish it, and it isn't nearly as long or as difficult as any of my proposed exceptions to Roth's rule.
Last summer, I found a copy of Bouvard and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù among stacks of books in a cabin in northern Wisconsin. This happened a few weeks after Andy Holden's art installation Chewy Cosmos Thingly Time made me aware of Gustave Flaubert's final work about the intellectual misadventures of two Parisian copy clerks. A fabricated library within the Chewy Cosmos Thingly Time exhibit included rugs that contained amusing lines from Bouvard and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù stitched into the design. Needless to say, I was intrigued.
I started reading the novel late that summer and had finished about half of it by the end of autumn. Then I got distracted by other books, and I didn't get around to returning to its pages until at least six months later. I read the second half of it this summer in short bursts while also reading other books, chiefly works by Roberto Bolaño.
The length of time it took me to read this book, and Roth's rule invalidating my having actually read it, strike me as relevant because Bouvard and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù is largely concerned with the nature of knowledge and its virtues, limitations, legitimacy, and ultimate value. Flaubert described his final work as "a kind of encyclopedia turned into a farce," a description that would also fit with another book I recently finished (within Roth's timeframe, I believe), Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño.
The novel chronicles its titular characters attempts to learn about agriculture, gardening, and food after having moved to the countryside to live on an estate. The complication is that with each subject they attempt to learn, they find they must learn more about a prerequisite subject in order to better understand what they're doing. So when they fail at gardening, they decide they must learn about chemistry. This pattern repeats with variations throughout the book.
When I described the book's plot to a friend recently, he said it pretty much sounds like his life. And in a way, Flaubert has constructed the perfect satire of all of us who wish to know more. This is a novel about the pitfalls of learning, of questioning, of thirsting for understanding, of unquenchable intellectual appetites. As a clergyman says to ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù, "Anyone who tries to get to the bottom of everything is sliding down a dangerous slope."
Flaubert offers a ruthless, almost hateful parody of bourgeois stupidity, but where the work succeeds most is in showing a comic empathy for the vain yet utterly human quest to make some sense of the world. Flaubert japes about our idiotic attempts to make a messy and imperfect match of thought and experience but only because he takes the challenge of doing just that so seriously
Ultimately, we may see through Bouvard and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù's misadventures that ignorance is the foundation of knowledge, that forgetting this fact is folly, and that one can only hope to truly know and understand the vast and unrelenting ignorance of humanity itself. This may seem to be a grim diagnosis but it helps that the novel is frequently hilarious.
Unfortunately, Gustave Flaubert died before he was able to complete Bouvard and ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù. The main text ends rather abruptly, in the middle of a scene of preparation for a lecture the protagonists plan to give the townspeople of Chavignolles. In the Penguin Classics addition I read (or didn't read, according to Philip Roth), what follows is Flaubert's rough plan for the denouement of the book. I found it frustrating to read this brief sketch because it presented such an excellent conclusion yet there is no way to ever read the actual prose of the thing since Flaubert never got to write it down.
Michael Cunningham recently touched on the subject of incomplete works in a piece for the New Yorker in which he describes the process of helping pick the three finalists for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He defends his selection of an unfinished novel, The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, by citing Chaucer, who completed only half of the Canterbury Tales before dying, along with the incomplete fragments of ancient Greek and Latin poetry that continue to influence literary culture to this day.
As an unreconstructed cinephile, I would add the oeuvre of Orson Welles to the list of incomplete but brilliant artworks since so many of his movies were prevented from being completed by the studios and other outside forces. The Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has even suggested that he deliberately leaves his movies incomplete so that the viewer may complete each one herself.
Despite this contrarianism, I still find it deeply unsatisfying to come to the end of Flaubert's last novel and find bullet points instead of the jocular, exquisite prose of the rest of the book. The unfinished work is an intriguing subject, but I'm not sure I can be persuaded by Kiarostami or anyone else to idealize it. Though I'd certainly like to hear ±Ê鳦³Ü³¦³ó±ð³Ù discuss the matter with Bouvard. Fanfiction anyone?
May 15, 2023
Wonder if this had an influence on Mason and Dixon...Flaubert and Pynchon two great writers about friendship. Lots of funny, brutal scenes. The other characters are pretty schematic (the mayor, the doctor, the lawyer, the scheming widow -- all pretty recognizable types of provincial gentry). Of course my illiterate ass was thinking that you could film an adaptation with Danny McBride as Bouvard and Walton Goggins as Pecuchet.
July 11, 2023
Along with some of his correspondence, this is the most enjoyable thing by Flaubert I've ever read. Original and amusing, it's a shame it's unfinished. But the bastard died, so what are you going to do?
April 30, 2018
Madam bovary is a masterpiece, this however is a painful slog
July 13, 2018
Once you get over the wackiness a romp that will remind you of someone you.
January 6, 2021
Few books subject a reader to the level of tedium of Gustave Flaubert's BOUVARD AND PECUCHET. After 152 pages I gave up and am moving on to more engaging material.
February 21, 2021
Hilarious and awesome read
August 17, 2023
third reread
September 30, 2023
I gave up. I just couldn't be bothered. Dictionary of Received Ideas is quite amusing but it's no "Devil's Dictionary".
Read
October 3, 2023I need a friendship like these two
May 12, 2024
Merci Raoul pour la reco
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