Bouvard and Pecuchet

Gustave Flaubert

nov 2005 · Dalkey Archive Press

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"Considered Gustave Flaubert's masterpiece, Bouvard and Pecuchet opens with two middle-aged copy-clerks who become fast friends after meeting on a city bench and discovering their shared habit of writing their names in their hats: "I should say so! Someone could walk off with mine at the office!" When a small inheritance allows Bouvard and Pecuchet to retire early and move to the country, they use their newfound leisure time to satisfy their curiosity about all the things they'd been too busy to study in the city. Flaubert shows his unlikely protagonists diving disastrously into everything from farming and politics to literature and love, and coming up empty-handed each time - until, finally, their obsessive pursuit of knowledge becomes an end in itself." "Bouvard and Pecuchet unravels the novel's realist tradition, and sets the stage for the modernist innovations of Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett. Although Flaubert died before completing it, this new translation contains the fullest and most accurate version of the text, as well as his "Dictionary of Accepted Ideas" and the previously untranslated "Catalogue of Fashionable Ideas.""--BOOK JACKET.

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Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) is considered to be one of the most important French novelists of the nineteenth century. He's most well known for his novel Madame Bovary, and for his desire to write "a book about nothing," a novel in which all external elements, especially the presence of the author, have been eliminated, leaving nothing but style itself. Often considered a member of the naturalist school, Flaubert despised categorizations of this sort, and in novels like Bouvard and Pécuchet demonstrates the inaptness of this label. In addition to these two novels, he is also the author of A Sentimental Education, Salambo, Three Tales, and The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Mark Polizzotti is the translator of more than thirty books from the French. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The Nation. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.