Andrew Brown (12)Recensioner

Unusual. At first I found its slight randomness annoying but then I realised that it makes it a more interesting book. It's very much the work of an individual rather than some sort of text book summary. (Annoying misprint in the bit about Fermat and Wiles, though.) Definitely one for rereading.

From the first sentence, I was captivated by this biography: 'The city of Rouen is dominated by its cathedral, and in particular by the black lattice-like structure rocketing up in to the sky from the nave, like a demented firework.' Andrew Brown manages to encapsulate the life of the great writer with wit, imagination, and superb writing. He describes his life span in an entertaining manner, obviously giving the reader the essential facts, interspersed with fascinating vignettes that illuminate the personality of Flaubert, and his particular writing style and philosophy. He loved ideas, was obsessively methodical in his research, passionate, sexually voracious, syphilitic. Highly recommended as a way to get a taste for the man and his methods, and then go on to more substantial biographies.

(Thanks to Hesperus Press, both for the review copy, and for the Brief Lives series, which is a wonderful thing.)½

I suspect that this book is intended for the seasoned Flaubert connoisseur. It is written in poetic, exhilarative prose that reads more like an attempt at literary acrobatics than straightforward biography. The person reading for a generalist overview will find themselves confused. I think that Brown has extraordinary talents, but am unsure if he managed to convey his information in any linear fashion. Indeed, many assumptions as to reader's knowledge were made. I read this book as a poetic celebration of Flaubert the man and his art, rather than a 'birth to death' account of life events and output.

A beautiful writer, but perhaps not for the reader wanting a straightforward biography of Flaubert. I enjoyed his writing style immensely but remain confused about his mandate in this series.

Thanks to the publishers for making this book available to me as an advanced copy.½

In my opinion this is an interesting book for students and lovers of literature, a less attractive one to readers who are approaching Flaubert's life with the expectations of readers of biographies.
There is no introductory news on Flaubert (eg when and where he lived) and in general the author takes for granted the knowledge of the whole Flaubert's work. Not exactley what I expect of a biography.
Anyway the book is enjoyable and enlightening on many aspects of Flaubert, the man and the writer. It can be easily read thanks to the concise and fast rythm of writing; the organization into short thematic chapters helps too.

The Brief Lives series is a wonderful idea. Full length literary biographies are often cumbersome and over long as a way of introducing readers to writers but if the Flaubert tome is anything to go by this new series will become indispensable. Similar in concept to the brilliant Fontana Modern Masters series that provided introductions to modern philosophers such learned introductory texts are excellent primers.

Andrew Brown knows both his subject's life and works well enough to give one confidence that this mercifully concise book tells the new or potential Flaubert reader everything he or she needs. Brown puts together a number of short. almost terse but beguiling chapters that take one through the life and the work in short order but in an eminently readable fashion.

Personally I shall not be revisiting Flaubert but then had I not read this work I might have and I know more of Flaubert's life than heretofore. A worthy and well executed short biography.

It has rarely been my habit to read literary biographies perhaps due to an unfounded fear of being disillusioned, disappointed, or unduly unmasking the enigma that the writer may be. However, I enjoy choosing and sometimes obtaining little literary gems through Library Thing's Early Reviewers' program and they have never let me down yet as an ardent lover of Flaubert, I was slightly hesitant and dubious about this biography.

Brown's writing exudes lyrical and poetic language and soon, my resistance was futile: I thoroughly enjoyed this succinct biography. . . and unlike some readers, the non-linear narrative was welcomed and not at all jarring to this voracious bookworm's focus and pleasure. Nevertheless, the biography left me wanting at times. Perhaps I ought to be less critical for I'm a quasi-seasoned Flaubert reader (and lover) and this book's intended audience is the general audience. . . it was never clearly stipulated in my humble opinion.

All the same, a delightful read, despite some instances that made me question the purpose of the biographer.½

This book is aimed at a reader like me—one who may have read no more than Madame Bovary or A Sentimental Education, and who might be curious about Flaubert's influence on Joyce and other English-language writers.

Brown's style vexes such an audience.

He writes beautifully at times, in a poetic language his subject would have admired. On the other hand, the author gets lost in his own beautiful sentences, and basks a little too much in his own literary cleverness.

Brown cracks quite a few sophomoric jokes. For example, on page 95, he lists the "mirabilia" which Flaubert "noted" walking through Cairo. At the end of the list, Brown surprises us by saying that Flaubert didn't actually note what he maintained a sentence earlier, that a detail came from Herodotus, and he included it because...well, I can't quite work out why. If that weren't enough, he repeats this limp device on page 152, this time putting Nietzsche's words in Flaubert's mouth.

The author makes puns which, on reflection, might be better left unmade. On page 160, when speaking of Flaubert's influence on Ulysees, Brown suggests the mot juste becomes the mot Joyce. There is a passage near the end of the book where Brown exhausts himself: he points out two words which pun on each other, and then fails to pun them. To the reader, this comes as something of a relief.

Brown is capable of great clarity, and also great befuddlement. Compare two short descriptions of the events of 1848; one at the beginning of the The Spiral on page 13, and another in a one-page chapter entitled 1848 on page 83. The latter is masterful and concise, evoking powerful melancholy with a few deft details; the former, in a single paragraph, offers just enough to confuse us before it moves on.

None of these elements condemns the book, necessarily. It bills itself as a short life, meant as a diversion rather than a definitive study. But Brown should remember that a casual reader differs from a scholarly one. The everyday reader soon tires of constant parenthetical remarks in mid-sentence, and tedious circumlocutions. For such a short book, it isn't a fast read.

That's a pity. When Brown writes at his best, he beguiles the reader. He wraps you in a lush prose that you enjoy sentence by sentence, rather like Flaubert.

But at his worst, you just want to tell the author to get his hand off it. "His life was governed by the untimeliness of anachronism, but also by timelessness." Oh, Mr. Brown, please!

Note: I received this free copy as a LibraryThing Early Reviewer, and thank the publishers.½

This slim volume was an ER book. It is part of a series on short biographies of important authors. I must say that I was not impressed.Although the author's writing style is very accompllshed, the content is troubling. Brown decided not to use a linear format and wrote his biography in themes. His history of Flaubert's life is confusing, and ironically does not give a good account of the writing of [Madame Bovary]. The information on the trial was also not as informative as it should have been. This is the reason a reader would go to a brief biography of this writer. Brown uses this book to show off his own intellect with obscure references and Latin phrases. He refers to present day works of literature, and does not hesitate to write about obscene events in Flaubert's life. In fact, the book reads like a pompous speaker taking over a discussion and boasting about his own knowledge. Some of the phrases and opinions are also inappropriate. Many of the events and words attributed to Flaubert should have had references and notes. Although Brown does have an extensive bibliography, he decided not to use it to show where he got his information for the specific quotes that he uses. I was very disappointed in this biography. I wasn't sure who the author was writing for- a small group of scholars who would get his obscure references or a less knowledgeable group who would laugh at his coarse tales of Flaubert's encounters with prostitutes and in a couple of episodes,diseased people.½

This is not your standard biography. Translator Andrew Brown abandons the usual chronological approach in favour of an entertaining, thematic narrative that moves through Flaubert's life by a kind of free association. The first chapter, for example, is on the spire of Rouen cathedral, and the second on the spiral of Flaubert's life, "a matter of many returns, not always happy (or even unhappy). I found it worked really well, giving more of an insight into Flaubert's character than a standard "life and times" approach would have done.

I learned that Flaubert was an iconoclast: "I don't want to be part of anything, to belong to any academy, any corporation, any association whatsoever. I hate the herd, the rule and the norm. A Bedouin, yes, as much as you like; a citizen, never."

Yet he was also against strongly-held opinions, because he could always see both sides of the argument. He lived through revolutionary times in France (both 1848 and 1870), but was as distrustful of communards as royalists. He detested stupidity, but found it everywhere, even in himself. He was always correcting, pointing out mistakes, tearing down the grand ideas and ideologies in which the 19th century abounded. He loved opposites and contradictions. When he wrote to his lover from Egypt she berated him for describing the bedbugs in too much detail; he replied that they were a part of the beauty, just as the lemon trees he saw in Jaffa formed a "complete poetry" with the rotting corpses half-exposed in the cemetery there. He could be quite vulgar in some of his writing - he refused to edit out anything.

Flaubert was very well-read, and got through enormous amounts of research for anything he wrote, and yet he was resolutely anti-intellectual. He seemed to grasp that no matter how much you know, there's always an enormous amount you don't know, or can't ever know. Perhaps that's why he chose fiction, where ideas and facts are inherently less firm than in non-fiction. His writing took a huge toll on his health, as he stayed up long into the night and described in his letters the physical effects of his labours. Yet he also realised that for all his research and hard work, an important ingredient of his fiction came from outside. Here's a prayer he wrote in his notebook while visiting Carthage:

"May all the energies of nature which I have breathed in penetrate me, and may they be breathed out into my work. Come to me, powers of creative emotion! To me, resurrection of the past, to me, to me! Through the Beautiful, something living and true must also be made. Have pity on my willpower, God of souls! Give me Strength and Hope!"

Flaubert's last book, Bouvard et Pecouchet, was his final indictment of all the stupid ideas that great men had uttered throughout history. He hoped that "once people have read it they won't dare speak again, for fear of uttering quite naturally one of the phrases in it." Or, as he wrote in a letter:

"I sense floods of hatred for the stupidity of my period, and I'm drowning in them. Shit keeps rising to my mouth, as in strangulated hernias. But I want to keep that shit, fix it, harden it; I want to make it into a paste with which I'd smear the 19th century, in the same way that they decorate Indian pagodas with cow dung."

By the end of this quite short book, I felt I knew Gustave Flaubert very well (perhaps too well!), thanks to the thematic approach and the extensive use of Flaubert's personal letters and notebooks. This is what I want from a biography, much more than the dates and formalities of his public life. I'd recommend this book, even if, like me, you have no particular prior interest in Flaubert.½

There is in French a substance called eau de fleur d’oranger – orange flower water. This term is in effect a double genitive and would not have been acceptable to Gustave Flaubert, who was so meticulous in his writing, apparently, that he regretted having used the expression “couronne de fleurs d’oranger” (a crown of orange blossom) – see page 116. In actual fact the printed text in Madame Bovary says une couronne d’orangers, and Andrew Brown suggests that an an-gelic [sic] copy editor corrected it. I honestly can’t believe that a copy editor would have thought it a mistake, and it’s quite possible that Flaubert changed it himself and forget that he had done so – that happens quite frequently to writers, in my own experience as a copy editor. “Couronne d’orangers” sounds to me more like a “crown of orange trees” and this must be a very rare instance of its use, as it is quoted as an example in my Robert dictionary. I have tried to do some research on the “double genitive” and can’t find any reference to it in French, so maybe Flaubert just had some silly kind of bee in his bonnet. Or maybe grammatical rules were more stringent in his time. They probably were.

Well, this is a very minor quibble and I’m sorry to dwell on it for so long, but I often found myself quibbling with little things in this book and disagreeing with some of the translations (they might not all be Brown’s own, as he did use translated works in his research, as mentioned in the Bibliography). I would have much preferred to sit down and read from beginning to end without these distractions, but somehow my attention kept drifting away from the narrative; I was floundering, and needed an anchor to hold on to.

Considering the great wealth of literature about Flaubert and his work, it is only natural that a writer embarking on another “Brief Life” should try a different tack, rather than encyclopaedically starting with the man’s birth, tracing his childhood, adolescence, education, travels and so on, and closing with his death. The book begins with a chapter entitled The Spire, followed by The Spiral, and the subsequent chapters thrust into and revolve around places, people, incidents and circumstances, heaving backwards and forwards until finally the shores of the conclusion are reached. I could not decide whether it was written as an introduction to the writer, for people already familiar with Flaubert’s works, for an academic audience, for historic interest, for all of those or for some other reason. Brown’s style is erudite, but his sentences are often very long and littered with parentheses and other digressions. It is, as stated on the back cover blurb, often entertaining, as well as informative, in a disordered kind of way.

Of all Flaubert’s works, I have read only Madame Bovary; I am also familiar with Bouvard et Pécuchet but only from the (excellent) 1989 film version by Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe, with Jean-Pierre Marielle and Jean Carmet. After reading about his other works, I do not feel tempted to pick up a copy of l’Education Sentimentale, Salammbô even less so, and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine not at all, and I can’t decide whether I would have liked Flaubert, the man, or not, had I met him during his lifetime. But my curiosity is sufficiently piqued to make me want to read Madame Bovary again.

What you'd expect from a book entitled Brief Lives: Gustave Flaubert is a short chronology; a linear account touching upon seminal events: birth, school, career, death, legacy. Of course the bulk the book should revolve around Madame Bovary, the obscenity trial, its aftermath. If you're lucky, you might get some Sentimental Education, a little Salammbô, maybe a quick mention of lesser known works. A straightforward account then - fast, cheap, easy.
Instead, Andrew Brown employs an entirely different strategy. Nothing in this biography is chronological. The events of the Flaubert's life are covered in an order that at first appears arbitrary, that is, no order at all. We jump-cut here and there and back again because dates and times are less important than the psychological impact of said events on Flaubert, or rather, his work, because Flaubert, the man, has a personality so full of contradictions, it's almost impossible to pin him down - he is slippery to say the least - as complex on the inside as he is outwardly simple. His opinions change from one correspondence to the next, even if his letters are addressed to the same person. His views on life, politics, people - well, depends if you catch him on a good day. And if you want to know what a typical day is like in the life of Flaubert, you'll get it. That doesn't alter - he is a man of habits, boring; the same man at 25 as he will be when he at last sets down the plume; but what he had for breakfast, whether he took naps, the names of his pets, these are inconsequential.
Save a few excursions outside France and many excursions to the whorehouse, his exterior life is uneventful. Brief Lives could have been briefer had Brown focused on this very limited aspect of his subject. Instead, uses short chapters (one just a single paragraph) from different periods of Flaubert's life to slowly reveal the inner workings of the novelist. Think of anecdotes forming like clouds, then evaporating - just enough time to catch the shape, then poof. But the psychology of Flaubert, and his working methodology reveal themselves incrementally from this fog of scant particulates. You get it, but you have to put in a little work yourself. Brown draws the outline, splashes some primaries here and there, but the reader must mix the colors to finish the portrait: how Flaubert works, what drives him, what impedes him - with a little effort, you'll get these.
It appears a good deal of research went into this short bio - perhaps a Flaubertian amount (a bibliography is included). There's definitely scholarship in Brown's details, his understanding of the correspondence between Flaubert and his intimates, as well as Flaubert’s own source material, which was extraordinarily extensive. (And there are lots of bad jokes.) On the whole however, Brown achieves what he sets out to do - give an inkling into his subject's almost indefinable character, and show how a man famous for creating perfect sentences went about forming those sentences. You get some titillation from the bordello as well.
Simply put, Brief Lives: Gustave Flaubert is the sort of book entirely dependent upon it's subject and the preconceived notions you bring to it. If you like Flaubert, find him interesting, want to know how he wrote his novels, you'll like the book and may wish to study further. If you dislike Flaubert, find him boring and abrasive, this book won't do much but confirm the opinion you had prior page one. (But most books are like that.)