Word: flaubert
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BOUVARD AND PÉCUCHET (348 pp.)-Gustave Flaubert-New Directions...
Anybody but Gustave Flaubert would have been satisfied to go down in history as the author of Madame Bovary, one of the most searching and compassionate stories of a woman ever written. But Flaubert was also gifted with an acute sense of the fatuous, had long thought his mission was to write an encyclopedic lampoon of human stupidity. At 51, he set out to write Bouvard and Pécuchet, the story of a couple of Paris copying clerks, simpletons both, who want to improve their minds. In preparation, he settled down to read everything he could find that passed...
...walls could speak, the manor house of Nohant in the French province of Berry would be a Niagara of sound. Chopin and Liszt set their music echoing through it; Flaubert and the younger Dumas produced puppet plays (music by Chopin) on its floor. Delacroix painted in Nohant's garden studio, and such famous guests as Balzac, Theophile Gautier and Alfred de Vigny argued and tittle-tattled in its drawing room. In the middle years of the 19th century, Nohant's halls, echoed to the thump of packed bags as estranged lovers and mistresses stormed down them...
...greatest writer of Italian fiction after Manzoni," said D. H. Lawrence. Between the two,'born half a century apart, runs the great divide of 19th century European literature, on the one side romanticism, on the other realism. If Manzoni is Italy's Hugo, Verga is its Flaubert, and its Zola too. Now the finest of Verga's novels, I Malavoglia, is introduced to U.S. readers as The House by the Medlar Tree. The Malavoglia are a family of boatmen. Verga's is the plain tale of their destruction by fate...
...titles-all of them books banned since 1600. Many of the names it includes must have popped up on Father Burke's old University of Illinois reading lists. Among them: Voltaire, Kant, Montesquieu, Descartes, Spinoza, Anatole France, Emile Zola, John Stuart Mill, Francis Bacon, Hugo Grotius, Gustave Flaubert, Maurice Maeterlinck...