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A review by grubstlodger
Three Tales by Gustave Flaubert
3.0
‘Madame Bovary’ was my surprise favourite book of a few years ago and ‘A Sentimental Education’ was a book that contained remarkable moments and set pieces but didn’t cohere into a fully satisfying work. I was intrigued to try the short stories to see what they’d do for me.
‘A Simple Heart’ was a simple story about a simple person. Flaubert attempted to write a story about a good person but I’m not sure he fully succeeded. I didn’t feel that Félicité was a particularly accurate or intriguing portrait of a good person living a good life but she’s not defined by goodness as much as a lack of imagination and general denseness. She stays loyal because she doesn’t have the ability to envision a different life. I found her faith to be shallow if sweet and the relationship with the parrot, both alive and stuffed, was touching. Why Flaubert went to such extremes, such as obtaining multiple stuffed parrots, for a tiny description, I’m not sure.
‘The Legend of St Julian’ was my favourite of the three. It reminded me of TH White’s ‘Once and Future King’ It shares a similar fable-esque style and love of playful anachronism. Having looked at the genuine legend, I liked how Flaubert tied the bloodthirstiness of Julian’s hunting with the prediction that he’d kill his own parents. I especially enjoyed how Julian was partly man of his time but cruel even by the standards of a cruel age. The end part with a crusty, leprosy-ridden Christ figure that requests help from the penitent Saint Julian. The story becomes peculiarly sexual as leprosy-Jesus strips piece by piece and lies closer to Julian until he spoons pox-ridden Christ to death.
I found ‘Herodias’ to be the weakest of the three stories. It was a little sluggish and drowns in its incidental details. None of the people come alive at all. John merely spouts bits of Bible, Herod and Herodias are very bland and blank. Other than showing how complicated and impossible the politics of the time and place are, and hinting how they will soon affect Jesus’s life, it doesn’t add much to the Bible story as it is.
I enjoyed this collection reasonably enough but feel I either lack the narrative subtlety of palate to really get the most out of these stories (or any short stories possibly). Even though I wasn’t fond of ‘A Sentimental Education’ in total, the characters were real and well described - I found that the characters in the short stories weren’t.
That said, I enjoyed how the stories worked thematically, showing three different kinds of sainthood, which made the collection a little better than the stories in themselves.
‘A Simple Heart’ was a simple story about a simple person. Flaubert attempted to write a story about a good person but I’m not sure he fully succeeded. I didn’t feel that Félicité was a particularly accurate or intriguing portrait of a good person living a good life but she’s not defined by goodness as much as a lack of imagination and general denseness. She stays loyal because she doesn’t have the ability to envision a different life. I found her faith to be shallow if sweet and the relationship with the parrot, both alive and stuffed, was touching. Why Flaubert went to such extremes, such as obtaining multiple stuffed parrots, for a tiny description, I’m not sure.
‘The Legend of St Julian’ was my favourite of the three. It reminded me of TH White’s ‘Once and Future King’ It shares a similar fable-esque style and love of playful anachronism. Having looked at the genuine legend, I liked how Flaubert tied the bloodthirstiness of Julian’s hunting with the prediction that he’d kill his own parents. I especially enjoyed how Julian was partly man of his time but cruel even by the standards of a cruel age. The end part with a crusty, leprosy-ridden Christ figure that requests help from the penitent Saint Julian. The story becomes peculiarly sexual as leprosy-Jesus strips piece by piece and lies closer to Julian until he spoons pox-ridden Christ to death.
I found ‘Herodias’ to be the weakest of the three stories. It was a little sluggish and drowns in its incidental details. None of the people come alive at all. John merely spouts bits of Bible, Herod and Herodias are very bland and blank. Other than showing how complicated and impossible the politics of the time and place are, and hinting how they will soon affect Jesus’s life, it doesn’t add much to the Bible story as it is.
I enjoyed this collection reasonably enough but feel I either lack the narrative subtlety of palate to really get the most out of these stories (or any short stories possibly). Even though I wasn’t fond of ‘A Sentimental Education’ in total, the characters were real and well described - I found that the characters in the short stories weren’t.
That said, I enjoyed how the stories worked thematically, showing three different kinds of sainthood, which made the collection a little better than the stories in themselves.