leelulah's review against another edition
5.0
This is my second approach to a “full” (?) if it can be called that way, work of Gustave Flaubert, of whom I had read a few chapters of Madame Bovary and the Dictionary of Received Ideas previously, so with that and the critique, I thought I was ready to sink my nose in this book.
And it couldn’t have been more precise. Much like Don Quixote, when you think they have done badly enough to feel furstrated abnd quit, they just don’t.
It’s a bit difficult not to enjoy this and wonder what would have been different if Flaubert would have finished this book, or what would have happened if he lived in a more contemporary setting, but it’s clear that the actuality of this book remains intact and as captivating as Don Quixote, or Pantagruel.
It’s considerably shorter, but not less exciting in the least. I think that it shows the dangers of wanting to apply pure knowledge that we do not understand to reality, with hilarious and sadly true results.
Obviously, Don Quixote has idealized fiction as a starting point. And Pantagruel is the smart one in a world of idiots. I’d say that Bouvard and Pécuchet are even more miserably treated by his author. They’re almost too similar until the major disagreements start. Still, there’s a lot of references to contemporary events, and essential questions of human nature.
It makes us question how do we receive that knowledge and how much of it can we trust, after all we organize it on systems for a better understanding, and it makes us question things we take for granted.
Probably all of our wisdom, repeated from books, isn’t anything but folly in the end. We have to consider the problem of knowledge more seriously, and fight the inner contradictions of being exposed to multiple theories, and it’s something I always have wondered, yet Flaubert manages to put it so easily.
In Borges’ article, Vindication of Bouvard and Pécuchet, he explains that Flaubert became a bit like them, by trying to learn about all these things so quick, to depict all the phases they went through, or maybe it was the other way around, wasn’t it?
I wish I hadn’t read it so quick, but the time is running.
And it couldn’t have been more precise. Much like Don Quixote, when you think they have done badly enough to feel furstrated abnd quit, they just don’t.
It’s a bit difficult not to enjoy this and wonder what would have been different if Flaubert would have finished this book, or what would have happened if he lived in a more contemporary setting, but it’s clear that the actuality of this book remains intact and as captivating as Don Quixote, or Pantagruel.
It’s considerably shorter, but not less exciting in the least. I think that it shows the dangers of wanting to apply pure knowledge that we do not understand to reality, with hilarious and sadly true results.
Obviously, Don Quixote has idealized fiction as a starting point. And Pantagruel is the smart one in a world of idiots. I’d say that Bouvard and Pécuchet are even more miserably treated by his author. They’re almost too similar until the major disagreements start. Still, there’s a lot of references to contemporary events, and essential questions of human nature.
It makes us question how do we receive that knowledge and how much of it can we trust, after all we organize it on systems for a better understanding, and it makes us question things we take for granted.
Probably all of our wisdom, repeated from books, isn’t anything but folly in the end. We have to consider the problem of knowledge more seriously, and fight the inner contradictions of being exposed to multiple theories, and it’s something I always have wondered, yet Flaubert manages to put it so easily.
In Borges’ article, Vindication of Bouvard and Pécuchet, he explains that Flaubert became a bit like them, by trying to learn about all these things so quick, to depict all the phases they went through, or maybe it was the other way around, wasn’t it?
I wish I hadn’t read it so quick, but the time is running.
charlottereed's review against another edition
2.0
Flaubert claimed that he read over 1500-something amount of sources for this novel. There is so much information in this novel that I have no idea what he could be bs-ing and what could be true. Difficult read only because there was no really plot line - just a lot of information
tracystan's review against another edition
4.0
Bouvard and Pécuchet by Gustave Flaubert
4 stars
Bouvard and Pécuchet meet by chance and from that day forward, they are inseparable. When Bouvard inherits from his uncle, the two go south, buying a farm. To occupy themselves, they take up studies in many subjects, usually giving up the second they are stymied. This was delightful to read, although very repetitive. The characters were so funny, fancying themselves scholars and experts after reading a few books on a topic. This was Flaubert's last, left unfinished, though the ending it has works as one. It is said to be his criticism of the arts and sciences, but I saw criticism of those people who study too much and forget to experience their subject.
While reading this, I listened to classical music from the Romantic period (DeBussy, Saint-Saens, and Berlioz, to name a few). The music was light and picaresque, much like the novel.
4 stars
Bouvard and Pécuchet meet by chance and from that day forward, they are inseparable. When Bouvard inherits from his uncle, the two go south, buying a farm. To occupy themselves, they take up studies in many subjects, usually giving up the second they are stymied. This was delightful to read, although very repetitive. The characters were so funny, fancying themselves scholars and experts after reading a few books on a topic. This was Flaubert's last, left unfinished, though the ending it has works as one. It is said to be his criticism of the arts and sciences, but I saw criticism of those people who study too much and forget to experience their subject.
While reading this, I listened to classical music from the Romantic period (DeBussy, Saint-Saens, and Berlioz, to name a few). The music was light and picaresque, much like the novel.
alldebooks's review against another edition
1.0
I am not enjoying this and am ready to give up. This is such a shame as Madame Bovary is one of my favourites, I am very disappointed.
I find their constant incompetence and failures infuriating rather than amusing. I can see what Flaubert was trying to satire with the constant search for knowledge in subjects that were beyond their capabilities. Too cynical for me. NEXT!!!!!
I find their constant incompetence and failures infuriating rather than amusing. I can see what Flaubert was trying to satire with the constant search for knowledge in subjects that were beyond their capabilities. Too cynical for me. NEXT!!!!!
dvlavieri's review against another edition
5.0
I just had a very Bouvard-Pécuchetian moment. After writing most of what I thought was a rather good review of Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet, I clumsily exed out the tab holding my unpublished review. All that hard work and no fruit to bear! Flaubert is a keen master of small human foibles taken to extremes. In Madame Bovary, his very funny, though perhaps severely misunderstood novel about a woman's mawkish sentimentality whose vitality exceeds her own, Flaubert plays with the elements of comedy and tragedy in such a way that our emotions toward Emma are constantly at odds. On the one hand, she is all schmaltz and vanity, she is shallow, she is vapid, but on the other hand, she represents that undying will in all of us that strives for our ideals, that unbendingly demands the perfect image of our future which is ever cast in front of out own imaginations. In Flaubert we are always dealing in extremes, in those who go too far, who do too much: who are self-destructive in their passions to the point of parody. In Bouvard and Pécuchet we are introduced to our dunce-capped duo: the embodiment of human failure and foolhardiness, but also of human endurance and academic fervor. Where Emma Bovary loves too much, but in a false love, an empty love, play-acted from pulp romances, Bouvard and Pécuchet seek an infinite knowledge, but lack the creative genius to form definite opinions, and instead fall on the contradictions and lacuna of scholarly texts on a number of subjects.
Bouvard and Pécuchet meet and become instant friends, as close as brothers. Both work as copy clerks in Paris, and occupy cramped corner apartments, until Bouvard comes upon a large sum inheritance from his avuncular father-figure, and the two head off to live in the country. Like Emma, play-acting in love, Bouvard and Pécuchet are always acting at the proscenium of their solipsism (a shared solipsism, a double madness, folie à deux) and critical reality. Their madness is in their methods: they are copyists by vocation, and as such they can only copy, but never create.
Their minds always at work at something which is beyond their reach, they are often too mired in specifics to grasp the larger picture. Their bottom-up approach to everything is ultimately their undoing and frequently leads to their frustration and disappointment. Even in deciding where to live gives them tremendous trouble. For though they have a tremendous capacity for seeing all sides of an issue, they lack the power to synthesize and balance that knowledge to form a clear image of reality:
Repeatedly, Flaubert refers to the misguided attempts and misadventures of our mock-heroes as having created "monsters" - great failures of applied knowledge. In their agriculurist-phase, after failing in cash crops and fruit, and moving on to garden vegetables:
Knowledge is a powerful thing: but power is morally neutral. It can be used to achieve progress, or halt and immolate progress; to save lives and to destroy them. Flaubert reminds us that complete knowledge is impossible, what we don't know always eclipses what we do, and the even greater shadow is what we don't know that we don't know. We cannot let this lack of knowledge rule us, we must seek to self-inform, to read in great volumes and in broad topics, to keep us from becoming narrow-minded. But equally important is to form our own knowledge, to synthesize what we take-in, to create our own views, to stand by them, but to remain always receptive and skeptical. It is a danger not to. Our Faustian fools give up everything in their pursuit of knowledge, but are unable to reconcile the quantity of views. As Bouvard and Pécuchet is a panorama of the follies in science and human knowledge, knowledge itself is the very mirror of that panorama. Every failure, folly, mistake, and every rare success feeds into the great accumulation of the human ken.
Bouvard and Pécuchet meet and become instant friends, as close as brothers. Both work as copy clerks in Paris, and occupy cramped corner apartments, until Bouvard comes upon a large sum inheritance from his avuncular father-figure, and the two head off to live in the country. Like Emma, play-acting in love, Bouvard and Pécuchet are always acting at the proscenium of their solipsism (a shared solipsism, a double madness, folie à deux) and critical reality. Their madness is in their methods: they are copyists by vocation, and as such they can only copy, but never create.
Sometimes Pécuchet pulled his manual from his pocket and studied a paragraph, standing, with his spade beside him, in the pose of the gardener decorating the book’s frontispiece.Like Pécuchet imitating the illustration in the book, the dunderheaded duo is ever ruined by their own lack of creative capacity. Their imaginations are purely proleptic: before opening a book they have already fully envisioned their success, but they ultimately lack the modest-temperament and genius required for that achievement. Despite their constant failures, the duo is dogged in their scholarship, and their itinerant passions are never extinguished by embarrassment or disheartedness. They are ever in the pursuit of their grande achievement, and care little wherein that achievement comes from: Like artists they craved applause. In Bouvard and Pécuchet, Flaubert splits himself in two: the stock and liberal, libertine Bouvard, and the gaunt, conservative and virginal Pécuchet. Like in Madame Bovary, Flaubert's last novel is both a condemnation and a mea culpa of human stupidity: a final salut to both mental frailty and scholastic endurance. Our pied protagonists are always devouring book upon book, volume upon volume, and mirror their creator's voracious reading appetite: Flaubert claims to have read north of 1,500 books in preparation for writing Bouvard and Pécuchet. And whether Flaubert's unfinished masterpiece is an encyclopedic farce or, in fact, a farcical encyclopedia, is a matter of debate: the reader will be grateful to have a dictionary handy, for each academic whim and fancy is pursued in the parlance and nomenclature particular to that rite. The great tragedy, and the grade statement of the novel, which teases us and jocosely punishes our foolish friends, is:
“Science is based on data supplied by a small corpus of knowledge. Perhaps it doesn’t apply to all the rest that we don’t know about, which is much more vast, and which we can never understand.”The worlds of science, of literature, of love, are much more in the shadow of our knowledge than in the light: there is ever more to know, and also that which cannot be taught, that which will never be precise or certain, but requires a creative cement to fill in the apertures. Bouvard and Pécuchet simply lack creative genius, they consume and consume knowledge, read books, study at length, but the inherent differences of opinion, vagaries of incomplete knowledge, and contradictions between authors are a pediment to what they believe is true success and enlightenment.
They no longer had a single fixed idea bout individuals and events of that time. To form an impartial judgement, they would have to read every history, every memoir, every newspaper and manuscript, for the slightest omission could foster an error that would lead to others, and unto infinity. They gave up."They gave up" is the ringing leitmotif of our foolhardy duo, and despite their frequent differences of opinion, they are forever united in their surrender and transition to greener, untended pastures.
Their minds always at work at something which is beyond their reach, they are often too mired in specifics to grasp the larger picture. Their bottom-up approach to everything is ultimately their undoing and frequently leads to their frustration and disappointment. Even in deciding where to live gives them tremendous trouble. For though they have a tremendous capacity for seeing all sides of an issue, they lack the power to synthesize and balance that knowledge to form a clear image of reality:
At times they has almost reached a decision; then fearing they would regret it later, changed their minds, the chosen place striking them as unwholesome, or exposed to the sea winds, or too near a factory, or difficult to reach.It is hard not to love these clumsy copyists, for every failure is taken in stride, and both stooges and spectators are visited by laughter at the precipitous ruin. Like a slapstick commedia dell'arte, the novel is suffused with physical comedy, but also high-minded ideas and a doggedness of heart that is truly endearing to behold.
Repeatedly, Flaubert refers to the misguided attempts and misadventures of our mock-heroes as having created "monsters" - great failures of applied knowledge. In their agriculurist-phase, after failing in cash crops and fruit, and moving on to garden vegetables:
The cabbages were his only consolation. One in particular gave him hope. It blossomed, grew, ended up being huge and absolutely inedible. No matter. Pécuchet was glad to have produced a monster.It is the nature of their madness to produce monsters, but fortunately those monsters are largely innocuous: simply mementos of their own folly. However, it is the zealotry of their simple-mindedness which produces these monsters, and has the capacity to create devastation. Like the monomania of the church or the rigid single-mindedness of political demagogues, zealous ignorance is far more dangerous than Bouvard's and Pécuchet's creative impotence. For Flaubert, though his two stooges lack in any real creative power, and in fact, are life-long copyists no matter the manifestation of their ephemeral endeavors, the stubborn ignorance and deliberate blindness of many of his heroes' critics are more likely to incite the reader's censure. Bouvard and Pécuchet are simple men with an innocent, if practically useless goal of self-enlightment, but they are often subject to the iniquities of their fellow townspeople, whether in the form of harsh criticism, personal attacks, or outright swindling, their simpleness is constantly being taken advantage of by their more Machiavellian country-folk. Despite their flaws, Flaubert's protagonists are exceedingly brave, determined and happy: they refuse to submit, despite their follies, to the yokes of others' preaches, and pursue their own happiness with a dogged passion.
Knowledge is a powerful thing: but power is morally neutral. It can be used to achieve progress, or halt and immolate progress; to save lives and to destroy them. Flaubert reminds us that complete knowledge is impossible, what we don't know always eclipses what we do, and the even greater shadow is what we don't know that we don't know. We cannot let this lack of knowledge rule us, we must seek to self-inform, to read in great volumes and in broad topics, to keep us from becoming narrow-minded. But equally important is to form our own knowledge, to synthesize what we take-in, to create our own views, to stand by them, but to remain always receptive and skeptical. It is a danger not to. Our Faustian fools give up everything in their pursuit of knowledge, but are unable to reconcile the quantity of views. As Bouvard and Pécuchet is a panorama of the follies in science and human knowledge, knowledge itself is the very mirror of that panorama. Every failure, folly, mistake, and every rare success feeds into the great accumulation of the human ken.
Still, all their reading had gone to their brains.
Bouvard, coming down with a cold, imagined he was getting pneumonia. Since leeches hadn’t relieved the twinge in his side, he resorted to a vesicatory, which affected his kidneys and made him think he was suffering from gallstones.
Pécuchet felt some stiffness while pruning the arbor and vomited after his dinner, which left him terrified. Then, noticing that his skin was a bit sallow, he suspected a liver condition, wondered “Am I in pain?” and ended up deciding that he was.
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