Central for me in the... «Something to Declare»
Oksident8 января 2017Central for me in the development of the modern sensibility is the figure of Gustave Flaubert. “I wish he'd shut up about Flaubert,” Kingsley Amis, with pop-eyed truculence, once complained to a friend of mine. Fat chance: Flaubert, the writer's writer par excellence, the saint and martyr of literature, the perfector of realism, the creator of the modern novel with Madame Bovary, and then, a quarter of a century later, the assistant creator of the modernist novel with Bouvard et Pécuchet. According to Cyril Connolly, Bouvard et Pécuchet was Joyce's favourite novel (Richard Ellmann thought this probable, if lacking documentary proof). Not Shutting Up About Flaubert—see the second half of this book—remains a necessary pleasure. When the Times Literary Supplement sent me the fourth volume of his Correspondance for review in 1998, the semi-satirical comp-slip tucked into the book read, “Could we have a million words, please (by April 13, if possible)?”
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