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flora_philologica's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
clempaulsen's review against another edition
5.0
Once you get over the wackiness a romp that will remind you of someone you.
atkinom's review against another edition
3.0
I had such high hopes for this novel, it certainly opened up strong. It was Flaubert at his best, painting vivid images with his words and keeping that infectious rhythm that makes reading him such a pleasure. Then, to add to my excitement, one of the characters had on his bookshelf, a copy of "something by Feneon". As a recent fan of Felix Feneon, I immediately started to read faster and wanted to get to know those two fellows, Bouvard and Pecuchet, all the more.
So.... all was well until about page 76. This is when the characters, among their many harebrained schemes and ideas, begin to torture and abuse animals, not to mention one human. I immediately lost all interest. Of course, I'm taking this too seriously and it's just a book.. blah blah blah.. but I'm way too sensitive about stuff like that. It's a shame too, because aside from this evil, those two bumbling fools were pretty funny, and Flaubert's writing is flawless, even if he did die before fully finishing this novel.
So.... all was well until about page 76. This is when the characters, among their many harebrained schemes and ideas, begin to torture and abuse animals, not to mention one human. I immediately lost all interest. Of course, I'm taking this too seriously and it's just a book.. blah blah blah.. but I'm way too sensitive about stuff like that. It's a shame too, because aside from this evil, those two bumbling fools were pretty funny, and Flaubert's writing is flawless, even if he did die before fully finishing this novel.
marcio's review against another edition
5.0
A escrita de Flaubert novamente me cativa neste delicioso e irônico livro. À princípio, parece que o livro se repetirá de diversas formas, mas talvez seja apenas a sensação de desenvolvimento da história num sentido espiral e, no entanto, cada página é um novo deleite, cada área do conhecimento que Bouvard e Péchuchet se propõem a estudar, embora sem método, o que lhes provoca os maiores dissabores, é um novo mergulho interessante no romance.
Mais do que um livro sobre a estupidez, é também um tratado sobre a mediocridade. E igualmente um tratado da mesquinhez humana (representado habilmente pela população de Chavingnolles). É cômico e trágico.
E, por fim, tornou-se impossível para mim não ver Bouvard e Péchuchet também como um retrato da nossa época. Leitura essencial!
Mais do que um livro sobre a estupidez, é também um tratado sobre a mediocridade. E igualmente um tratado da mesquinhez humana (representado habilmente pela população de Chavingnolles). É cômico e trágico.
E, por fim, tornou-se impossível para mim não ver Bouvard e Péchuchet também como um retrato da nossa época. Leitura essencial!
borislermontov's review against another edition
3.0
Puede que no sea un gran libro (desde luego muy por debajo de Madame Bovary o de La educación sentimental) pero hacía tiempo que no simpatizaba tantísimo con un personaje como con los protagonistas de la última novela de Flaubert, esos dos entrañables hombres con unas ansias infinitas de conocimiento que se pasan durante años intentando aprender lo máximo posible de todos los ámbitos posibles: medicina, religión, filosofía, historia, botánica, etc. Parece como si Flaubert se propusiera repasar todo ámbito del conocimiento humano, llevando siempre a los protagonistas a la inevitable conclusión de que todo lo que se sabe al respecto no es suficiente y les deja insatisfechos.
El trabajo de documentación es apabullante y agotador, hasta el punto de que creo que pesa en contra del libro con tantas páginas citando centenares de obras, autores y teorías, pero realmente no llegué a aburrirme como me temía al principio y el carácter tan inocente y humanista de esos Bouvard y Pecuchet que simplemente desean de buena fe hacer del mundo un lugar mejor aplegando todo el conocimiento posible me hizo más llevadera la lectura.
El trabajo de documentación es apabullante y agotador, hasta el punto de que creo que pesa en contra del libro con tantas páginas citando centenares de obras, autores y teorías, pero realmente no llegué a aburrirme como me temía al principio y el carácter tan inocente y humanista de esos Bouvard y Pecuchet que simplemente desean de buena fe hacer del mundo un lugar mejor aplegando todo el conocimiento posible me hizo más llevadera la lectura.
eleanorfranzen's review against another edition
Previous Flaubert experience: Madame Bovary (1857) when I was fifteen. Nothing since, although last autumn I read Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), which reminded me to have a go at one of Flaubert’s other works.
~~
Bouvard and Pécuchet was Flaubert’s last novel. He never finished it, and what he did manage to write (ten chapters out of a projected twelve) took him years. He alleged that he had read fifteen hundred books as research. He also regularly spoke of the project as an opportunity to vent his anger at the world, using the word “vomiting” repeatedly to describe his writing process. All that said, it’s hard not to approach the novel with at least a little trepidation. While I do think that one of the best ways to ruin a work of art is to create it with unrestrained rage, and while Bouvard and Pécuchet is, in many ways, a weak novel, it’s not actually one that resists the reader as strongly as I’d feared. It’s also a forerunner of modernist and post-modernist literary performances: Ulysses is often cited. I’d argue you can see bits of Don Quixote and even Middlemarch in there as well.
The basic story is this: two lonely, middle-aged copy clerks meet each other by chance on a Parisian sidewalk bench. They get to talking,fall in love develop a friendship, and become each other’s dearest pal. One of them, Bouvard, eventually receives a legacy from his “uncle” (actually his father, who became embarrassed by his own poor treatment of his bastard son and made a deathbed will), which they use to purchase a house and farm estate in the countryside. There, they move, and there they intend to live in rural splendour and simplicity, cultivating intellectual pursuits, freed from the shackles of town and wage. What actually happens is that, for the next twenty years, they engage in dilettante-ish fascination with multiple different fields and objects of study, abandoning one whenever it loses its shine and moving on to the next, leaving physical and emotional devastation in their wake.
One immediately obvious thing about Bouvard and Pécuchet is that you could never film it, but it might make quite a good comic mini-series. (Indeed, French TV did this in 1990.) Because it is so deeply episodic—each chapter is dedicated to a different area of study that the men obsess over, whether it’s agriculture, archaeology, fiction and history, or religious observation—there’s not much of an opportunity to develop plot or deep interiority, but there is an explosion, natural disaster, or other catastrophe pretty much every thirty pages or so. Structurally, it’s not unlike a Tom and Jerry cartoon, if Tom and Jerry spent the time between falling anvils discursing amiably on the nature of gravity and developing a theory of metalworking.
The through-lines that do emerge are concerned with their neighbours and the local villagers. Particularly, women reappear, generally in seductive guise: the widow Mme. Bordin, who is both a flirt and a rapacious land-grabber; the farmer’s wife Mme. Castillon, desperately in love with the heartless heartthrob Gorgu; Mélie, the sexy maid, who ends up sleeping with the hunchbacked manservant and is promptly thrown out, with no apparent distress; and Victorine, the small daughter of a locally famous convict whom the two men disastrously attempt to educate, along with her brother Victor. Pécuchet reveals, partway through the book, that he is a virgin at fifty-two, having fallen in love many times but never been accepted by any woman, and too fearful to go to a brothel. Bouvard, on the other hand, is a bit of a roué, leading him into entanglements with Mme. Bordin. Other recurring village characters include M. Vaucorbeil, the doctor (permanently having to fix up unsuspecting peasants upon whom the two gentlemen have practiced some new and hare-brained notion), Abbé Jeufroy, the cleric (forced into constant theological defense mode when the two take up religion), and M. Faverges, the local nobleman (invitations to his house ebb and flow, indicating the men’s standing in the community). There’s also the excellently lazy servant Germaine, who is replaced in the latter half of the book by Reine, whose gentle cheerfulness goes further towards rehabilitating Victor and Victorine than their lessons do.
The primary point of Bouvard and Pécuchet—which the novel makes again, and again, and again—is that an attempt to systematise the knowledge of the world through absolutism is doomed. The men are obsessed with “science” and “method”, but what they end up with is a gallimaufry of received opinion, quackery, hackery, and conflicting theories. Trying to teach themselves facts without learning how to think critically first, they are consistently overwhelmed when one authority confidently recommends one thing only to be contradicted by another, equally confident, authority. The sentence “They gave up” recurs regularly. Their attempts to teach children are a natural extension of this disastrous approach: the children learn less than nothing, are constantly confused, and eventually act out so badly (Victor by boiling a cat, which is quite upsetting; Victorine by kissing a boy her age, which is less so) that they’re sent away, an outcome that you can’t help but imagine the bad behaviour might have been calculated to produce. This is where I get both the Don Quixote comparison—books confused with life, principles and theories mistaken for universal truth and fact—and the Middlemarch one: Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies is no less demented an undertaking than Bouvard and Pécuchet’s decades of self-bewilderment.
However. Is it well-written enough to keep my attention through pages of stupid men doing stupid things from motives that we’re explicitly told are stupid? Yes. Flaubert was a proponent of the perfect sentence, in prose as in poetry; he used to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite until every word was spot-on and perfectly placed, and you can tell. It’s just a shame, to my mind, that he spent the end of his life making something this bitter (although bits of it are funny, too; your mileage may vary), but it hasn’t put me off reading his other work.
This is the second book in my 2024 B-Sides reading project, an attempt to explore the lesser works of authors whose “big” or “famous” books I’ve already read.
~~
Bouvard and Pécuchet was Flaubert’s last novel. He never finished it, and what he did manage to write (ten chapters out of a projected twelve) took him years. He alleged that he had read fifteen hundred books as research. He also regularly spoke of the project as an opportunity to vent his anger at the world, using the word “vomiting” repeatedly to describe his writing process. All that said, it’s hard not to approach the novel with at least a little trepidation. While I do think that one of the best ways to ruin a work of art is to create it with unrestrained rage, and while Bouvard and Pécuchet is, in many ways, a weak novel, it’s not actually one that resists the reader as strongly as I’d feared. It’s also a forerunner of modernist and post-modernist literary performances: Ulysses is often cited. I’d argue you can see bits of Don Quixote and even Middlemarch in there as well.
The basic story is this: two lonely, middle-aged copy clerks meet each other by chance on a Parisian sidewalk bench. They get to talking,
One immediately obvious thing about Bouvard and Pécuchet is that you could never film it, but it might make quite a good comic mini-series. (Indeed, French TV did this in 1990.) Because it is so deeply episodic—each chapter is dedicated to a different area of study that the men obsess over, whether it’s agriculture, archaeology, fiction and history, or religious observation—there’s not much of an opportunity to develop plot or deep interiority, but there is an explosion, natural disaster, or other catastrophe pretty much every thirty pages or so. Structurally, it’s not unlike a Tom and Jerry cartoon, if Tom and Jerry spent the time between falling anvils discursing amiably on the nature of gravity and developing a theory of metalworking.
The through-lines that do emerge are concerned with their neighbours and the local villagers. Particularly, women reappear, generally in seductive guise: the widow Mme. Bordin, who is both a flirt and a rapacious land-grabber; the farmer’s wife Mme. Castillon, desperately in love with the heartless heartthrob Gorgu; Mélie, the sexy maid, who ends up sleeping with the hunchbacked manservant and is promptly thrown out, with no apparent distress; and Victorine, the small daughter of a locally famous convict whom the two men disastrously attempt to educate, along with her brother Victor. Pécuchet reveals, partway through the book, that he is a virgin at fifty-two, having fallen in love many times but never been accepted by any woman, and too fearful to go to a brothel. Bouvard, on the other hand, is a bit of a roué, leading him into entanglements with Mme. Bordin. Other recurring village characters include M. Vaucorbeil, the doctor (permanently having to fix up unsuspecting peasants upon whom the two gentlemen have practiced some new and hare-brained notion), Abbé Jeufroy, the cleric (forced into constant theological defense mode when the two take up religion), and M. Faverges, the local nobleman (invitations to his house ebb and flow, indicating the men’s standing in the community). There’s also the excellently lazy servant Germaine, who is replaced in the latter half of the book by Reine, whose gentle cheerfulness goes further towards rehabilitating Victor and Victorine than their lessons do.
The primary point of Bouvard and Pécuchet—which the novel makes again, and again, and again—is that an attempt to systematise the knowledge of the world through absolutism is doomed. The men are obsessed with “science” and “method”, but what they end up with is a gallimaufry of received opinion, quackery, hackery, and conflicting theories. Trying to teach themselves facts without learning how to think critically first, they are consistently overwhelmed when one authority confidently recommends one thing only to be contradicted by another, equally confident, authority. The sentence “They gave up” recurs regularly. Their attempts to teach children are a natural extension of this disastrous approach: the children learn less than nothing, are constantly confused, and eventually act out so badly (Victor by boiling a cat, which is quite upsetting; Victorine by kissing a boy her age, which is less so) that they’re sent away, an outcome that you can’t help but imagine the bad behaviour might have been calculated to produce. This is where I get both the Don Quixote comparison—books confused with life, principles and theories mistaken for universal truth and fact—and the Middlemarch one: Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies is no less demented an undertaking than Bouvard and Pécuchet’s decades of self-bewilderment.
However. Is it well-written enough to keep my attention through pages of stupid men doing stupid things from motives that we’re explicitly told are stupid? Yes. Flaubert was a proponent of the perfect sentence, in prose as in poetry; he used to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite until every word was spot-on and perfectly placed, and you can tell. It’s just a shame, to my mind, that he spent the end of his life making something this bitter (although bits of it are funny, too; your mileage may vary), but it hasn’t put me off reading his other work.
This is the second book in my 2024 B-Sides reading project, an attempt to explore the lesser works of authors whose “big” or “famous” books I’ve already read.
sonia_a_pinto's review against another edition
4.0
Devorei ao primeiro terço do livro, mas depois comecei a cansar-me de tanta "parvoíce"... O livro é quase um tratado sobre todas as teorias/filosofias. Sei que o objetivo do autor era esse e ainda bem que não o acabou...
fionnualalirsdottir's review against another edition
Review in diary form.
My favourite books are those that cause me to think so much while I’m reading that I start having animated conversations with myself and need to begin the review even before I’m a third of the way through as a means of continuing the dialogue in my head about the book, wishing I had an alter-ego, someone who is as enthusiastic as I am about the matter in hand, a double, as it were, like Bouvard and Pécuchet who bounce their thoughts off one another continuously and are often of the same mind, so that, at least early on, they can almost be seen as a single individual which is how I think Flaubert saw them, as a single type, but he needed them to dialogue with each other so he split them into two and gave them individual characteristics both in their physical and their mental make-up, although, where knowledge is concerned, and this is the core of the book, they are of exactly one mind: madly enthusiastic and obsessively determined to access all levels of scholarship in all domains, and to that end, they set about reading a veritable mountain of books, passing with feverish haste from one branch of the sciences to the next as new passions are triggered by what they've only just begun to investigate, each new idea adopted leading them to make crazier and crazier alterations to their already unbalanced mode of living...
..........................................................................
The more I become acquainted with the addicted pair, the more I am reminded of someone I know, someone who is as familiar to me as Bouvard is to Pécuchet, someone with whom I have the most animated conversations, so I took a look at this person’s ‘mountain of books’, because this person has also accumulated quite a few tomes by a variety of authors, and like Flaubert’s two heroes, this person's preoccupations can be traced in the history of their reading, a history which reveals periods of intense concentration on one author, several of whose books will have been read in a row, and when that author is shelved, another takes his place, and on and on, one book leading to another, one area of interest quickly giving way to the next, and during the time that a particular author or subject is being focused on, the person in question becomes an instant ‘expert’, commenting left, right and centre on the preoccupation of the moment, quite the way Bouvard and Pécuchet do, who manage to alienate everyone in the immediate vicinity with their ‘superior’ grasp of the subject in question so that friends and acquaintances begin to avoid them, but, however, in spite of such negative outcomes, it must be emphasized that the more Bouvard and Pécuchet read, the more sensible they become and the less their creator seems to want to ridicule them, which only goes to show that even the person I mentioned who reads through her ‘mountains of books’ with such random passion but unquestionable fervour, may not be as crazy as she seems....
......................................................................................
One of the advantages of writing a review while still reading a book should be that when we reach the last page and are probably quite tired, we don't have to worry about tackling the review. I've just this minute moved [b:Bouvard Et Pécuchet|1567509|Bouvard Et Pécuchet|Gustave Flaubert|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347354612s/1567509.jpg|47799253] from ‘currently-reading’ to 'read', and although I am tired and glad I don't have to begin a review from scratch, I'm left with an empty feeling, I kind of wish I was still reading it and still able to add quotes to the updates...
I know! I could include a few quotes here in the review space, copy out a few paragraphs of the text to make myself feel better...especially from the last section of the book which is not included in the English edition. I checked online and the English version seems to end at chapter VIII, skipping chapters IX and X, as well as Flaubert's notes for the conclusion. So there is something for me to do after all, something which doesn't demand any strenuous thinking or any advancing of Flaubertian scholarship:
Ainsi tout leur a craqué dans les mains.
Ils n'ont plus aucun intérêt dans la vie.
Bonne idée nourrie en secret par chacun d'eux. Ils se la dissimulent. De temps à autre, ils sourient, quand elle leur vient; puis se la communiquent simultanément: copier.
Confection du bureau à double pupitre. Achat de registres--et d'ustensiles, sandaraque, grattoirs, etc.
Ils s'y mettent.
Un jour, ils trouvent le brouillon d'une lettre de Vaucorbeil à M. le Préfet. Le Préfet lui avait demandé si Bouvard et Pécuchet n'étaient pas des fous dangereux. La lettre du docteur est un rapport confidentiel expliquant que ce sont deux imbéciles inoffensifs.
"Qu'allons-nous en faire?"
"Pas de réflexion! copions!"
I’ve paraphrased that passage:
Bouvard's and Pécuchet's latest scheme for the pursuit of knowledge has come to nothing and they feel that their lives are empty. But then they both conceive a new idea which each nurses secretly for a while. They smile to themselves from time to time when they think about it, and then they share it with each other at the same moment: they will go back to being copyists. [That is what they were at the beginning of the book when they both worked in offices where they sat day after day at their desks copying documents.] So they get a desk big enough for two and they buy all the necessary equipment. And they set to work, copying texts out of all the books they’ve gathered in their frenetic pursuit of knowledge.
One day they find a draft of a letter from their doctor to the Chief of Police of the town. The Police Chief had asked the doctor if he thought Bouvard and Pécuchet could be considered dangerous madmen. The letter from the doctor explains that they are indeed crazy but completely harmless.
"What will we do with it?" one asks the other.
"Don't think about it. Let's just copy it!"
Since, like the two heroes, I've also adopted the copying mode, I'm going to copy out an excerpt from Guy de Maupassant's review of [b:Bouvard Et Pécuchet|1567509|Bouvard Et Pécuchet|Gustave Flaubert|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347354612s/1567509.jpg|47799253] when it was finally published unfinished in 1881. Flaubert died in 1880.
Maupassant's review appeared in 'Le Gaulois' on April 6th, 1881 and is included at the end of my addition of [b:Bouvard Et Pécuchet|1567509|Bouvard Et Pécuchet|Gustave Flaubert|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347354612s/1567509.jpg|47799253] (Scroll down for a translation)
On peut dire que la moitié de la vie de Gustave Flaubert s’est passée à méditer Bouvard et Pécuchet, et qu’il a consacré ses dix dernières années à exécuter ce tour de force. Liseur insatiable, chercheur infatigable, il amoncelait sans repos les documents. Enfin, un jour, il se mit à l’œuvre, épouvanté toutefois devant l’énormité de la besogne. « Il faut être fou, disait-il souvent, pour entreprendre un pareil livre. » Il fallait surtout une patience surhumaine et une indéracinable bonne volonté.
Là-bas, à Croisset, dans son grand cabinet à cinq fenêtres, il geignait jour et nuit sur son œuvre. Sans aucune trêve, sans délassements, sans plaisirs et sans distractions, l’esprit formidablement tendu, il avançait avec une lenteur désespérante, découvrant chaque jour de nouvelles lectures à faire, de nouvelles recherches à entreprendre. Et la phrase aussi le tourmentait, la phrase si concise, si précise, colorée en même temps, qui devait renfermer en deux lignes un volume, en un paragraphe toutes les pensées d’un savant. Il prenait ensemble un lot d’idées de même nature et comme un chimiste préparant un élixir, il les fondait, les mêlait, rejetait les accessoires, simplifiait les principales, et de son formidable creuset sortaient des formules absolues contenant en cinquante mots un système entier de philosophie.
Une fois il lui fallut s’arrêter, épuisé, presque découragé, et comme repos il écrivit son délicieux volume intitulé : Trois Contes.
Puis il se remit à la besogne.
Mais l’œuvre entreprise était de celles qu’on n’achève point. Un livre pareil mange un homme, car nos forces sont limitées et notre effort ne peut être infini. Flaubert écrivit deux ou trois fois à ses amis : "J’ai peur que la terminaison de l’homme n’arrive avant celle du livre ce serait une belle fin de chapitre."
Ainsi qu’il l’avait écrit, il est tombé, un matin, foudroyé par le travail, comme un Titan trop audacieux qui aurait voulu monter trop haut.
Et, puisque je suis dans les comparaisons mythologiques, voici l’image qu’éveille en mon esprit l’histoire de Bouvard et Pécuchet.
J’y revois l’antique fable de Sisyphe : ce sont deux Sisyphes modernes et bourgeois qui tentent sans cesse l’escalade de cette montagne de la science, en poussant devant eux cette pierre de la compréhension qui sans cesse roule et retombe.
Mais eux, à la fin, haletants, découragés, s’arrêtent, et, tournant le dos à la montagne, se font un siège de leur rocher.
Here’s my translation of the quoted part of Maupassant's review :
"It could be said that Flaubert spent half his life thinking about the story of Bouvard and Pécuchet, and that he spent the last ten years working on it. He was a dedicated reader and a tireless researcher, and he had been constantly accumulating documents. One day, he finally began the book, apprehensive nonetheless about what he was about to undertake. "A person would need to be crazy," he often said to himself, "to tackle such a book." Incredible amounts of patience and unshakable determination were what he needed most.
At Croisset, in his large study with its five windows, he slaved day and night on the project. Without a respite, or any distractions, his mental capacities stretched to breaking point, he progressed with a terrible slowness, discovering each day new subjects to examine, new research to explore. And the shape of his sentences also preoccupied him, he needed concise expressions to render in two lines the ideas of a particular thinker but the sentences also needed to be interesting. He'd gather a group of similar themes, and just as a pharmacist preparing an elixir, he'd mix and meld, throwing away what was superfluous, extracting the essentials, and from his flask there emerged perfect aphorisms which, in fifty words, summarized complete systems of philosophy.
At one stage he had to give up the project. He was exhausted, discouraged, and as a way to relax, he wrote the excellent 'Trois Contes'.
Then he returned to the task. But the project undertaken was one that would never be completed. Such a book destroys a man because our strength has its limits and our energy can never be infinite. Flaubert wrote on several occasions to friends, "I fear that the end of the man will arrive before the end of the book which will make for a fitting final chapter."
And just as he'd foretold, one morning, like an overly ambitious Titan who had climbed too high, he collapsed, struck down by the weight of the work.
And since I've had recourse to mythological allusion, the image that comes to my mind when I think of the story of Bouvard and Pécuchet is the following. I see the myth of Sisyphus: Bouvard and Pécuchet are a modern bourgeois Sisyphus who tirelessly try to scale the mountain represented by science, while pushing ahead of them the rock of understanding which constantly rolls backwards. Finally, breathless and discouraged, they give up, and turning their back on the mountain, they use the rock as a seat instead." Guy de Maupassant
It turned out that Bouvard and Pécuchet were more than happy sitting on that rock of knowledge in the end rather than trying to move it forward. Contentment at a desk with a blank sheet of paper and a pot of ink and lots of lovely words just waiting to be copied...