Flaubert

Winock’s unremarkable—though nicely detailed and elegantly translated—life of Gustave Flaubert adds nothing new to the ground already covered better and more entertainingly by Frederick Brown’s Flaubert: A Biography and Geoffrey Wall’s Flaubert: A Life. In straightforward fashion, Winock narrates Flaubert’s life from his early years living on the grounds of a hospital (he was the son of a renowned surgeon) and his youthful decision to become a writer (“to write, is to take hold of the world”) to his amorous on-again-off-again relationship with Louise Colet, his intellectual friendship with George Sand, his fascination with Egypt, and his brush with financial ruin. Winock offers close readings of Flaubert’s writings: in Madame Bovary, “Flaubert had turned the trivial into art”; in Salammbô, “he satisfied his need for beauty with horrifying and monstrous scenes.” Winock suggests that Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is perhaps the novelist’s true masterpiece because, in presenting the lives of ordinary people, it escaped “the ruins of the heroic novel—a genre to which Madame Bovary still belonged.” Winock’s serviceable biography paints a familiar portrait of the “hermit of Croisset” as the artist who elevated the art of writing above the fray of the modern world, becoming the “most modern writer of his time.” (Oct.)