Flaubert

Flaubert, Michel Winock, Belknap Harvard, $35 ISBN: 978-0-674-73795-2

Gustave Flaubert is one of those names that seems to make France more French and perhaps more foreign – a daunting master of language who seems to defy translation.
He once wrote: “A good prose sentence should be like a good line of poetry, unchangeable.”
But, oh, what language. He wrote of his work on Madame Bovary “I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles”.
Michel Winock tells us that he would write 10 pages to keep one that satisfied him and spoke of enduring “atrocious pain” to whittle down, extend, shorten, prune and restrain his prose.
He often took two days to finish two sentences and once complained: “My damn Bovary is tormenting me and exhausting me.”
There is no mention of how long it took to write the note he sent his mistress, Louise Colet: “All the little stars of my heart converge around your planet, oh my beautiful celestial body.”
There can be little doubt that his final epistle to Ms Colet was dashed off in seconds.
On hearing that she had tried to visit him he wrote: “Madame […] I was not in. And, fearing lest persistence expose you to humiliation, I am bound by the rules of politeness to warn you that I shall never be in.”
There is no need to be a Flaubert expert to savour this – it rewards dipping in for a few pages and Mr Winock’s style (translated by Nicholas Elliott) is charming.