Volume 29, Number 1 · February 4, 1982
Sartre's Last Case
By Frederick Brown
The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857, Vol.I
by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Carol Cosman
University of Chicago Press, 627 pp., $25.00
The Family Idiot makes it sufficiently clear that writing three volumes and twenty-eight hundred pages about Gustave Flaubert was not for Sartre a labor of love. But there were many other occasions on which he explicitly voiced his antagonism to the great novelist. 'That's Flaubert for you—a heavy Norman gent who walks in mud, drives a horse and buggy, a ponderous, provincial character,' he said during an interview published by L'Arc in 1980. 'I'm not talking about his style (although it, too, has its clumsy moments); I'm talking about his personal reality. He's a man whom one would not have liked to spend much time with.'
Review, 4646 words
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