Gustave Flaubert: A Sentimental Education

I read this more out of obligation and stubbornness than anything else. I read half of Madame Bovary in College, and was not impressed, so I grumbled a bit when my muse, Philip Ward over at http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtward.html sent me in Flaubert's direction again. Perhaps my taste has matured since undergrad, though, because I was cured of my ambivalence by the second chapter.

Flaubert does nothing particularly eye-catching or unique in this novel, other than his overflowing sentence structure--often the clauses build up on each other like banks of snow, and hang precipitously over the next paragraph. It would be easy, in view of this seeming conventionality, to view the book as unoriginal. I easily forget that his scrupulous focus on the concrete, in addition to making the title a bit ironic, is itself an innovation. A Sentimental Education was written in a decidedly sentimental literary world, and Flaubert's abhorrence of sentimentality is, in fact, rather brave.

It is not for its literary significance that I recommend this book, however. I was thunderstruck by Flaubert's keen insight into the human mind, and especially into human pettiness. To take one sterling example, after he relents to his mistress,"Frederic didn't enjoy hearing her take for granted an action which he considered noble" (418). What a marvelous observation on Flaubert's part. He precisely identifies a thought of the sort that lives in all minds, but rarely makes it onto the page. In short, Flaubert paints a chillingly unsatisfying picture of "society's almost unlimited capacity for indifference", beginning from within the mind of one young man (261).