Bouvard and Pécuchet are two Chaplinesque copy-clerks who meet on a park bench in Paris. Following an unexpected inheritance, they decide to give up their jobs and explore the world of ideas. In this, his last novel, unfinished on his death in 1880, Flaubert attempted to encompass his lifelong preoccupation with bourgeois stupidity and his disgust at the banalities of intellectual life in France. Into it he poured all his love of detail, his delight in the life of the mind, his despair of human nature, and his pleasure in passionate friendship. The result is “a kind of encyclopedia made into farce,” wholly grotesque and wholly original, in the spirit of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quixote or Ulysses.
‘Bouvard and Pécuchet’ (1881) was written by the great French author Gustave Flaubert, famous for his scandalous best-selling novel ‘Madame Bovary’. Although unfinished at the time of his passing, this posthumous novel is now considered one of Flaubert's masterpieces. Two retired Parisian clerks, Bouvard and Pécuchet, set out on a quest for truth and knowledge, but despite constant failure, the pair continue their symbolic adventure with dogged optimism. A humorous, gripping satire that touches on politics, love, and religion, ‘Bouvard and Pécuchet’ is Flaubert at his best. Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was a French novelist, regarded as one of the great Western writers and a leading exponent of literary realism in France. A hugely influential figure, he is best known for his debut novel ‘Madame Bovary’ (1857) which caused a nationwide scandal upon publication with its realistic portrayal of bourgeois life. The historical novel ‘Salammbô’ and the painting-inspired ‘The Temptation of Saint Anthony’ are some of his other well-known works. Many of Flaubert’s stories have since been adapted for TV and film including ‘Madame Bovary’ (2000) starring Hugh Bonneville.
Samuel Beckett as a guru for business executives? James Joyce as a guide to living a good life? The notion of notoriously experimental authors sharing a shelf with self-help books might seem far-fetched, yet a hidden history of rivalry, influence, and imitation links these two worlds. In The Self-Help Compulsion, Beth Blum reveals the profound entanglement of modern literature and commercial advice from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Blum explores popular reading practices in which people turn to literature in search of practical advice alongside modern writers’ rebukes of such instrumental purposes. As literary authors positioned themselves in opposition to people like Samuel Smiles and Dale Carnegie, readers turned to self-help for the promises of mobility, agency, and practical use that serious literature was reluctant to supply. Blum unearths a series of unlikely cases of the love-hate relationship between serious fiction and commercial advice, from Gustave Flaubert’s mockery of early DIY culture to Dear Abby’s cutting diagnoses of Nathanael West and from Virginia Woolf’s ambivalent polemics against self-improvement to the ways that contemporary global authors such as Mohsin Hamid and Tash Aw explicitly draw on the self-help genre. She also traces the self-help industry’s tendency to popularize, quote, and adapt literary wisdom and considers what it might have to teach today’s university. Offering a new history of self-help’s origins, appeal, and cultural and literary import around the world, this book reveals that self-help’s most valuable secrets are not about getting rich or winning friends but about how and why people read.
Bouvard et Pécuchet details the adventures of two Parisian copy-clerks, François Denys Bartholomée Bouvard and Juste Romain Cyrille Pécuchet, of the same age and nearly identical temperament. They meet one hot summer day in 1838 by the canal Saint-Martin and form an instant, symbiotic friendship. The work resembles the earlier Sentimental Education in that the plot structure is episodic, giving it a picaresque quality. Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was an influential French writer who was perhaps the leading exponent of literary realism of his country. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary and for his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert.
In his own words, the novel is "a kind of encyclopedia made into farce . . . A book in which I shall spit out my bile." At the center of this book are Bouvard and Pécuchet, two retired clerks who set out in a search for truth and knowledge with persistent optimism in light of the fact that each new attempt at learning about the world ends in disaster. In the literary tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift, this story is told in that blend of satire and sympathy that only genius can compound, and the reader becomes genuinely fond of these two Don Quixotes of Ideas. Apart from being a new translation, this edition includes Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas.
"Bouvard and Pécuchet" is one of Gustave Flaubert's most well-known works. With its meticulously crafted sentences and precise words, the novel has endured the test of time without losing its impact and expressive power. The narrative focuses on two credulous characters, the copyists, and friends, Bouvard and Pécuchet, who, upon receiving an inheritance, decide to swap Paris for life in the countryside. The result is a series of mishaps, narrated with refined humor and laden with criticism. The structure of the narrative depicts the very obsession with the pursuit of truth as a wheel spinning in vain, amusingly and pathetically involving its two protagonists and all the encyclopedic knowledge of the 19th century. The work " Bouvard and Pécuchet" is part of the famous collection: "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die."
Jacques Barzun's masterful translation proves that Flaubert's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas--an acid catalogue of the clichés of 19th-century France--is as relevant today as ever.
