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A review by robertlashley
A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
5.0
Like all great misanthropes, Gustave Flaubert was most effective when he takes it down a notch. There are more moments of syntactic beauty in chapters of Madame Bovary than in entire books of novelists of manners who claimed his influence ( talking to youuuuuuu, Louis Auchincloss). But like all witty motherfuckers angry at the world, I had to bow and duck away from his furious brilliance. His authorial hand veering between scorn for Emma's choices and the world that drove her to them is a bit too heavy and inorganic. And the literary form of the novel-the conduct book-is TOO FUCKING LOAAAADED to be nihilistically ambiguous about.
My case for A Sentimental Education is that the writer who wrote Madame Arnoux understood that the inhumanity of men was more of a problem than any "trashy novel" a woman would read. "Realism" is too blinkered a cage for Flaubert at his best here for two reasons. The first is that the tag lends too much to the conventions and biases of the time, which was why it was trashed so much. Education is a novel of ill manners among the french upper classes, centered around Frederick, a cad who fails upward during the time before and after the french revolution of 1848. His failures are tied into his image of Madame Arnoux as a sentimental ideal and not a grown-ass woman, so much so that when Madame wants a relationship, he recoils. The sentimental as an ideal being tantamount to the perfect being the enemy of the good is pervasive in the novel, as the theme of the privileged really not doing much of nothing as life is happening around them. This was the reason that the novel was trashed: especially by a young and dumb as fuck Henry James who was pissed off because of the class callouts and that there were no dead ladies getting their just desserts.
The second reason that realism is too blinkered a cage for Education is that you can see the influence of this novel on three of the biggest modernists in the history of the 20th century. In As I lay Dying, you can see Flaubert's exquisite imprint on his style and how the novel can be read as "a Sentimental education for poor white people blinkered by race." As well as her deconstructing the Bovary Archetype in There Eyes Were Watching God, Jonah's Gourd Vine wears Educations's influence in its tale of a corrupted holy man who thinks he can fail upward but can't.
However, the writer who Flaubert got the best out of was Ernest Hemingway. Mario Vargas Llosa says it better than anyone ( in Ernest's PBS documentary) when he defends The Sun Also Rises as a modernist tone poem that shows a world that surrounds and subtly indicts the hipster nihilism of its protagonists( a blueprint Flaubert started with Education). You can see it most tellingly in A Farewell To Arms, where Hemingway's cad of a Frederick goes to war, and its horrible sense of personal and psychological happenstance tests the holy hell out of him( and most devastatingly, in the end, his Catherine.)
What a magnificent asshole, That Gustave Flaubert
My case for A Sentimental Education is that the writer who wrote Madame Arnoux understood that the inhumanity of men was more of a problem than any "trashy novel" a woman would read. "Realism" is too blinkered a cage for Flaubert at his best here for two reasons. The first is that the tag lends too much to the conventions and biases of the time, which was why it was trashed so much. Education is a novel of ill manners among the french upper classes, centered around Frederick, a cad who fails upward during the time before and after the french revolution of 1848. His failures are tied into his image of Madame Arnoux as a sentimental ideal and not a grown-ass woman, so much so that when Madame wants a relationship, he recoils. The sentimental as an ideal being tantamount to the perfect being the enemy of the good is pervasive in the novel, as the theme of the privileged really not doing much of nothing as life is happening around them. This was the reason that the novel was trashed: especially by a young and dumb as fuck Henry James who was pissed off because of the class callouts and that there were no dead ladies getting their just desserts.
The second reason that realism is too blinkered a cage for Education is that you can see the influence of this novel on three of the biggest modernists in the history of the 20th century. In As I lay Dying, you can see Flaubert's exquisite imprint on his style and how the novel can be read as "a Sentimental education for poor white people blinkered by race." As well as her deconstructing the Bovary Archetype in There Eyes Were Watching God, Jonah's Gourd Vine wears Educations's influence in its tale of a corrupted holy man who thinks he can fail upward but can't.
However, the writer who Flaubert got the best out of was Ernest Hemingway. Mario Vargas Llosa says it better than anyone ( in Ernest's PBS documentary) when he defends The Sun Also Rises as a modernist tone poem that shows a world that surrounds and subtly indicts the hipster nihilism of its protagonists( a blueprint Flaubert started with Education). You can see it most tellingly in A Farewell To Arms, where Hemingway's cad of a Frederick goes to war, and its horrible sense of personal and psychological happenstance tests the holy hell out of him( and most devastatingly, in the end, his Catherine.)
What a magnificent asshole, That Gustave Flaubert