Flaubert Book

From the seclusion of a tiny Norman village, Gustave Flaubert wrote a masterpiece that would scandalize France, conducted an ardent - if mostly epistolary - romance with his importunate mistress, and observed the world with equal degrees of precision, compassion, and disgust. Only a biographer with the gifts of Henri Troyat could do justice to this thorny and much-misunderstood genius. With the same solid scholarship and stylish prose he brought to his lives of the Russian literary masters Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Turgenev, Troyat unravels the enigma of this immensely sensual writer who cherished seclusion, reveled in frustration, and went on to outrage society with Madame Bovary. Troyat's engrossing biography reconstructs Flaubert's life based on the novelist's remarkable and prodigious correspondence with his family and friends: his birth in 1821 to a provincial bourgeois family; his education and early travels; his friendships with Bouilhet, Du Camp, Maupassant, George Sand, Turgenev, and Zola; his remarkable literary career, which produced not only Bovary but Salammbo, L'Education sentimentale, Trois Contes, and the unfinished and problematic Bouvard et Pecuchet. Flaubert offers a perfect marriage of biographer and subject, splendidly written, balanced in its literary judgments, and graced with a narrative brio and psychological acuity worthy of Flaubert himself.