Flaubert

'Bouvard and Pecuchet' is an incredible novel, a Peter Greenaway-esque catalogue of hobbies. Some copies include at the end Flaubert's 'Dictionary of Received Ideas', which is a withering pseudo-dictionary of mediocre bourgeois stereotypes. Wonderful!

I recently downloaded 'Salammbo' from a database of free books on the web at

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/

but haven't got far enough in yet to tell you anything about it.

Gustav Flaubert, c'est moi.

He was one of my Special Authors (no, not special as in 'Special' Children) at college so if you had asked me 5 years ago I would've been an expert. As it is all I can remember now is my tutor asking me if I found it strange reading a novel where the main character has the same first name as me. Which I didn't.

I enjoyed Salammbo at the time. Dictionary of Received Ideas = crucial reading for 2002, Year of New Snobbishness (this is a Good Thing).

C'est "BovAry", je crois Madame.

Read here

salammbo is an astonishing and bizarre mixture of unashamed orientalism and sadean cruelty - the lautreamont of its day. Erm, the other lautreamont of its day, rather.

a sentimental education is a great yarn full of black humour

the temptation of st anthony is erudite and weird/feverish in equal measure. it took 3 decades to complete. It will probably take me 4.

madame bovary never grabbed me that much, haven't read Bouvard and Pecuchet.

He is worth reading because he writes with unsurpassed economy and cynicism.

I was sorely disappointed by Madame Bovary when I had to read it in high school, because our teacher promised us that there were scenes of hardcore pornography in it. Sadly it was just a big fat lie cooked up to get us to read the whole thing. Le sigh.

I think I would enjoy it more now if I went back and re-read it, but when you go through a novel looking specifically for porn and don't find any it can be a bit of a let-down.

Salammbo was pretty strange, I remember -- been almost a decade since I read it, so I'll have to go back. Never read anything else of his.

The copy of Salammbo my tutor lent me had a pic of a nude woman on it. Earlier in the term I had passed out during a belly dancing lesson and bashed my head causing a really awful headache, so awful that I couldn't do any work (ahem). I explained all this to my tutor who was suitably dumbstruck by my great excuse. However upon lending me his be-nuded Salammbo he said 'I wonder if she is a belly dancer, ha ha'. I am still not sure if this counts as sexual harassment or a particularly weak attempt at mateyness.

i loved madame bovary , it was sort of unreddemably sad , almost meloncholy . Thanks to this thread i got 'Bouvard and Pecuchet' out of the library and will read it tomorrow .

isn't everyone made to read 'madame bovary' in school? it was tiresome. i have also read 'sentimental education' as well which is slightly better if only becaue madame arnoux seems the ideal character for me to marry.

Actually no, I finally read Madame Bovary thanks to Avital Ronell's hilarious interpretation of said novel in Crack Wars . I was a bit disappointed at first that Madame Bovary wasn't about drugs at all. ;) Still very good read and of course I kept picturing Isabelle Adjani as Bovary. And yeah, thanks to this thread I'm going to read some more, all the books mentioned sound really interesting.

Flaubert --> Joyce -->

--> 1. Beckett

--> 2. O'Brien ("F")

--> 3. Nabokov --> Amis (M).

No excess of disrespect to Amis - but somehow the way this genealogy turns out makes it seem less impressive than it would if it had ended with Pale Fire.