Au Revoir, Tristesse by Viv Groskop

Author:Viv Groskop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2020-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

7. True happiness may involve quite a lot of hypocrisy: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

(Or: Beware people who dump you by leaving a note in a basket of apricots)

Flaubert is an author who occupies a certain place in people’s imaginations, even those who aren’t very familiar with his work. His superficial reputation is probably as someone who thinks about things a bit too much and is a bit too finicky and pretentious. So basically, Flaubert is the ideal nineteenth-century French writer. When the novelist Julian Barnes was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 1984 for his novel Flaubert’s Parrot, there was a flurry of renewed interest in Flaubert, whom everyone now assumed was a fan of multicolored feathered friends everywhere. In fact, Flaubert only owned a parrot for a short amount of time, and it was stuffed. For people who are irked by pretension around literature and putting fancy writers up on pedestals (readers will already realize I hate this kind of author-worshipping business), Flaubert’s Parrot is a deeply irritating final straw: it’s a book about the futility of trying to pin down “the real Flaubert” while a retired doctor called Geoffrey experiences the futility of trying to pin down Flaubert’s real stuffed parrot. (Which, of course, is not a real parrot because it is stuffed.) And all this in a novel that, of course, is not a real story. Exhausting, isn’t it, being meta?

My early association with Flaubert was—erroneously—predominantly negative, which is a shame, as I’ve later come to enjoy Madame Bovary as one of my favorite novels of all time. I had never heard of Flaubert when I first saw his name on my university reading list. It was summer. I had just turned eighteen, and I was due to leave home—finally—for the first time in September. I was headed toward the escape I had been planning for approximately thirteen years. And I was headed toward a world where I would be immersed in French for four years. And also in Russian, although at that point I spoke not a single word of Russian. It was usual at the University of Cambridge to choose a language you knew and one you didn’t and do a degree combining both. And this was my chosen path in life. Continue with the French I loved. And discover the Russian that I believed reflected my true ancestry. A complicated tussle between the two languages eventually ensued, with Russian briefly winning but French triumphing in the long-term, largely because it’s an easier language, France is easier to get to, and they have wine.

Anyway. All that was ahead of me. Before I was to go to university, the French reading list arrived in the post (as email didn’t exist). It was about ten pages long and mentioned at least two hundred books. This was the reading list for the first eight-week term. And only for one subject: nineteenth-century French literature. To say that I panicked would be a giant understatement. I had the

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