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Carregando... Flaubert: A Lifede Geoffrey Wall
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Registre-se no LibraryThing tpara descobrir se gostará deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. This is a fairly good overview of Flaubert's life. Wall who was or is primarily a translator is very good on three of the main relationships of Flaubert's life, Maxime Du Camp, Louise Colet and George Sand. The trip to Egypt, the correspondence with Colet and the reliance on Sand are the best parts of the book, but it is strangely uneven with many obvious and glaring omissions. One questions whether Wall was up for a biography or for his own version of what interested him. ( ) 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. 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.
To write the life of Gustave Flaubert, therefore, requires exceptional resources of energy and patience. The energy, for example, to read through and select the choice and telling morsels from the Letters, when the temptation must be to quote them all; the patience, say, to recount the dreary recriminatory cycles of the affair with Louise Colet or, even more crushing, the endless grinding depressions of the later years. Geoffrey Wall has acquitted himself superbly on both these counts; and, what is more, his new Life of Flaubert is as frankly entertaining as his subject demands - a tremendous achievement. The book is, above all, a study in sympathy. Prêmios
"How is it that Flaubert, the last of the great French romantics, still seems so incredibly modern? In this biography, Geoffrey Wall investigates why it is that the author of Madame Bovary still exerts such a hold upon our imaginations." "Gustave Flaubert lived quietly at home with his widowed mother, writing wonderful novels at a rate of five words an hour and escaping to Paris, for refreshment, every few months. A great traveller - to Corsica, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Morocco - he kept company with courtesans, actresses, acrobats, gypsies, idiots and simpletons of every stripe. Flaubert detested his respectable, provincial neighbours, referring to them, on a bad day, as 'the bourgeoisie'. They, in turn, heaped infamy upon his name and contrived to have him persecuted for writing an immoral book. Decent people avoided his company and he returned the compliment." "Flaubert's characters, his novels and his stories live on in the popular literary imagination with the same authority as those of Shakespeare and Joyce. An Egyptian hermit tormented by voluptuous devilish visions; a melancholoy doctor's wife eating arsenic to escape debt and despair; a Carthaginian priestess of the moon ritually caressing a giant snake; an old countrywoman who worships a stuffed parrot. Ancient or modern, sublime or ludicrous, Flaubert's characters are visionaries. They travel towards the dark places of the mind, and their fate prompts our pity, fear and laughter."--BOOK JACKET. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — Carregando... GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)843.8Literature French French fiction Later 19th century 1848–1900Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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