Volume 34, Number 12 · July 16, 1987
Mad About the Guy
By Roger Shattuck
The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and 'Madame Bovary'
by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Helen Lane
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pp., $17.95
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.
Review, 2294 words
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