Bouvard and Pecuchet

Gustave Flaubert

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Although unfinished during his lifetime, Bouvard and Pécuchet is now considered one of Flaubert's greatest masterpieces.

In Flaubert's own words, the novel is "a kind of encyclopedia made into farce . . . A book in which I shall spit out my bile." At the center of this book are Bouvard and Pécuchet, two retired clerks who set out in a search for truth and knowledge with persistent optimism in light of the fact that each new attempt at learning about the world ends in disaster.

In the literary tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift, this story is told in that blend of satire and sympathy that only genius can compound, and the reader becomes genuinely fond of these two Don Quixotes of Ideas. This new translation also includes Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas.

Book Details

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Publish Date: Nov 30th, 2005
Pages: 328
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.07in - 5.54in - 1.09in - 1.02lb
EAN: 9781564783936
Categories: • Classics• Humorous - General• Literary

About the Author

Polizzotti, Mark: - Mark Polizzotti is the translator of more than thirty books from the French. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The Nation. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Flaubert, Gustave: - Known for his scrupulous devotion to his art and perfectionist style, French writer Gustave Flaubert is counted among the greatest Western novelists, and influenced such writers as Franz Kafka and J. M. Coetzee. Flaubert is best known for Madame Bovary, for which he was prosecuted (and acquitted) for offending public morals. His other works of note include Memoirs of a Madman, November, Salammb?, Sentimental Education, and The Temptation of Saint Anthony. His work has been widely adapted for the stage and screen. Flaubert died in 1880.

Praise for this book

In Bouvard and Pecuchet, Flaubert created an encyclopedia of the sciences in a way that emphasizes all the laws and failures of knowledge, and at the same time, he did so in a way that breaks the forms of literature itself. --Claudine Cohen

In Bouvard and P cuchet, Flaubert created an encyclopedia of the sciences in a way that emphasizes all the laws and failures of knowledge, and at the same time, he did so in a way that breaks the forms of literature itself. --Claudine Cohen

Flaubert inspires in me an affection that I don't feel for any other writer. --Jean Echenoz

Among all the works of this brilliant writer, Bouvard and Pecuchet is definitely the deepest, the most thorough, the broadest. . . . It is the Tower of Babel of the sciences, where all the diverse, opposing, and absolute doctrines each having its own language demonstrate the powerlessness of effort, the vanity of affirmation, and the ever eternal 'misery of everything.' --Guy de Maupassant

"Among all the works of this brilliant writer, Bouvard and Pecuchet is definitely the deepest, the most thorough, the broadest.... It is the Tower of Babel of the sciences, where all the diverse, opposing, and absolute doctrines -- each having its own language -- demonstrate the powerlessness of effort, the vanity of affirmation, and the ever eternal 'misery of everything.'" --Guy de Maupassant

"Flaubert inspires in me an affection that I don't feel for any other writer." --Jean Echenoz

"In Bouvard and Pecuchet, Flaubert created an encyclopedia of the sciences in a way that emphasizes all the laws and failures of knowledge, and at the same time, he did so in a way that breaks the forms of literature itself." --Claudine Cohen, Alliage