Word: flaubert
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Roth tries to get from life to fiction depends on formal tricks, in an effort to refine and accentuate the pure material. It is symptomatic that Roth should have his hero, through the account of his unhappy marriage and a couple of affairs, keep quoting from Flaubert, the original great modern impersonalist. Because Tarnopol can no longer just live his personal life. He has not just read too many novels, like Madame Bovary; he has read too many novels like Madame Bovary. He is condemned to work out the hassles of his marriage in a long, unfinished and unfinishable novel...
They are well-defined characters, though, complex actors upon whose behavior under stress the outcome of these stories depends. His ability to develop his characters into more than stereotypes separates Just from most writers of political fiction, and it elevates The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert and Other Washington Stories above most of what has been written about that city...
...Congressman Who Loved Flaubert," Just sketches the dilemma facing a Southern Liberal congressman, once an intellectual, whose attitude toward the Indochina war becomes intertwined with conflicting impulses. Somehow Just's congressman must balance the demands of his House colleagues, his constituents, his best friend and his conscience; and all his considerations must boil down to a yes/no decision on a specific anti-war resolution in the House. Just succeeds in conveying the sense of an individual caught in a conflict he does not begin to control, of an individual facing the question not only of his potency...
...CONGRESSMAN WHO LOVED FLAUBERT...
...attack it. Yet their book goes far beyond other books based on interviews in that they attempt to create a comprehensive modern theory of class structure as it holds for the majority of people. Drawing together thoughts from philosophers and modern social scientists, even from literary sources such as Flaubert and Tolstoy, they grope and question and gradually develop a very deeply felt portrait of society and its hierarchies. In the end, Sennett and Cobb present a utopian picture of a world with diverse standards of achievement where every man can feel his worth, but unfortunately this is also...