Bouvard and Pecuchet

by Gustave Flaubert, D. F. Hannigan (Editor)

Overview

Bouvard and Pecuchet are two Chaplinesque copy-clerks who meet on a park bench in Paris. Following an unexpected inheritence, they decide to give up their jobs and explore the world of ideas.

In this, his last novel, unfinished on his death in 1880, Flaubert attempted to encompass his lifelong preoccupation with bourgeois stupidity and his disgust at the banalties of intellectual life in France. Into it he poured all his love of detail, his delight in the life of the mind, his despair of human nature and his pleasure in passionate friendship. The result is 'a kind of encyclopedia made into farce,' wholly grotesque and wholly original, in the spirit of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quixote or Ulysses.

This edition includes the Dictionary of Received Ideas, which was intended to follow Bouvard and Pecuchet as part of a second volume.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781605017044
Publisher:	MobileReference
Publication date:	01/01/2010
Series:	Mobi Classics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	277 KB

About the Author

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was one of the most important writers of the 19th century, the inventor of the contemporary short story, and the direct forerunner of modernist literature. He, more than any other single figure, is the creator of modern prose: his terse, hard-edged style reveals character, plot, and theme not by authorial exposition, but by extreme precisions of diction, voice, and detail. Joyce explicitly modeled himself on Flaubert; Pound called him "Papa Gustave"; and the critic James Wood wrote, "Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring; it all begins again with him."
Mark Polizzotti is a writer and translator from the french whose books include the collaborative novel S., Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited and Sympathy for the Traitor. His articles and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, Partisan Review, and elsewhere. He has translated works by Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, and Jean Echenoz. He currently directs the publications program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Editorial Reviews

"Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring; it all begins again with him."  —James Wood 

"Why should we read Bouvard and Pécuchet? They are we, and we are they." —Rick Prelinger, SF MOMA

From the Publisher