A biography of Flaubert is reviewed in the NYT:
In a sense, Flaubert would always remain the Kid, the boy who dropped out of law school and came home and never left again, the writer who likened writing to masturbation (and sentences to ejaculate), and who, late in his life, would claim that “two things sustain me: love of Literature and hatred of the Bourgeois.” This is what Flaubert meant when he said that “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” His most famous novel oscillates between this realism and romanticism. On the one hand, Emma Bovary’s dreams of escape, her reading of popular romances, are seen as deluded and vulgar; on the other, the “realists” who would condemn her are people like her dreadful mother-in-law and the pompous chemist, Homais. Flaubert scourges Emma and indulges her. He sees from her perspective, and seems to agree with her when she denounces life as “all lies.”
I read “A Simple Heart” last week, which reminded me of why I prefer Maupassant to Flaubert. When it comes to short stories, anyhow, the student surpassed the master. But I think I might have to pick up this biography anyhow, as I find the contradictory aspects of Flaubert’s character to be compelling. I particularly find his interest in historical fiction to be intriguing, as it is a much-dismissed genre these days in the eyes of the high literary circles that still nevertheless consider him to be one of the greats.
I wouldn’t go as far as the reviewer does in declaring Flaubert the originator of the modern novel, however, as modern is such a hopelessly relative term, if not completely meaningless. I champion no other author’s claim to the title, you understand, it’s only that seems overly arbitrary to place Dickens, Cervantes and Murasaki together in one category and Flaubert, Hemingway and Gibson in the other.