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Mad About the Guy | Roger Shattuck | The New York Review of Books

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Has Flaubert become our Shakespeare? Or because of the modern attempt by prose fiction to dethrone poetic drama, is he simply overrated? We should listen carefully to what novelists have been saying. Henry James called him “a novelist’s novelist.” Conrad, Proust, Joyce, and Kafka left no doubt about how much they admired Flaubert and learned from him. More recently writings by Sarraute and Nabokov have reaffirmed his status as revered Master. Francis Steegmuller’s Flaubert and Madame Bovary, published in 1939, reads more like a novel than like a biography or a literary study. The three thousand pages of Sartre’s effort to settle the score with his literary father take on the compulsiveness of an unfinished pilgrimage. The Idiot of the Family absorbed and recycled Sartre’s considerable novelistic powers into a task already classified as impossible by Roquentin’s aborted biography of Rollebon in Nausea. While Sartre was still toiling, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa spent over t

Visit us on Facebook! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Twitter! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Threads! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Bluesky! Opens External Webpage Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and 'Madame Bovary' by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Helen Lane Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pp., $17.95

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