Word: flaubert
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...stories in these two collections form a literary skyline ranging from grand ruins to temporary housing. After weathering the years in all critical climates, the French tales, engineered by such masters as Stendhal, Flaubert, de Maupassant, are pitted in spots, but glow with the patina of timelessness. The Italian stories, put up in the hurry and scurry of the post-World War I decades by such contemporary literary architects as Alberto Moravia, Carlo Levi and Vasco Pratolini, rock with life, and occasionally with shaky craftsmanship. American readers, surfeited with New Yorker-like tales of muted discontent, may find both collections...
...fragment of Swiftian satire by Baudelaire on the suicide of a Parisian street urchin. In between, Balzac, Zola and Guy de Maupas sant lash at the favorite whipping boy of French letters, the French middle class. Best yarns in the book are stories of simple nobodies by Gustave Flaubert and Joris-Karl Huysmans...
...Green Parrot. In A Simple Heart, Flaubert takes a plain-as-rain spinster housemaid and erodes her placid life with tragedies. From dawn to dusk, Felicité slaves for the Aubain family, all of whom take her toil for granted. She loves her young nephew like a son, but he dies at sea. Desolate, she clings to the delicate Aubain daughter only to see the girl die of TB. Felicité swaddles her grief in piety and finds a pet in a green parrot. After a few years the parrot dies too, and Felicité has it stuffed. Time robs...
...Flaubert grants his two heroes superiority over their contemporaries. Bouvard and Pecuchet, having found that they cannot conquer the world with ideas, return to their old task of copying. They build a double copying desk and set to work together. As in Voltaire's Candide, their last act is their most noble; a realization of the world's shortcomings and the acceptance of a simple, limited vocation as the only attainable reality of life...
...Flaubert's "Dictionary of Accepted Ideas" contains many of the author's observations of the superficial and Inane thought in the nineteenth century. Samples are printed below: (Translated by Jacques Barzun; New Directions...