Geoff's Reviews > Sentimental Education

*this book deserves anywhere between 4.2 and 4.7 stars


“Funny, how the things you have the hardest time parting with are the things you need the least.” (Bob Dylan)


With every work I read or reread by Flaubert, I am all the more convinced that he was the master craftsman, that he was master of attention to the tiny stuff, the small details that are layered brick by brick (word by word), the master of attention to even the mortar between the bricks, and master of raising the whole damn superstructure. The buildings he makes out of words hold the world, and I want to call him King of the Paragraph, because his seem so measured, so precise, so carefully wrought. I’ve heard complaints that his detailing of minutiae can become tedious, but to me that is evidence of the eye fully open, the mind ticking at a heightened rate, the physicality of the world irresistibly impressing itself on his realism. His emotional sketches are just as profound and rich as his inventories of space; his sketches of those characters void of human emotion are equally as profound. Flaubert is almost that Joycean image of the author pairing his nails, detached, his handiwork submerged in refinement. Almost. Because above all Flaubert is a satirist. So his presence is felt, as a ripple on the surface of the water is evidence of a rampart crumbling on the ocean floor. I stole that from Frank O’Hara. But kind of like the experience of reading Nabokov, Flaubert the artist is what is on full display here, and in Sentimental Education, as I said when I was writing about Bouvard and Pecuchet, he is perched behind his curtain like Oz or comfortably atop Mount Olympus like the prankster gods of old. He animates his characters to illustrate human folly above all else- who are we to sympathize with in Madame Bovary? who do we not find ridiculous in B & P? who deserves our alliance in Sentimental Education? - but the almost indefinable thing about Flaubert is that amid his mockery he comes off as touching. Because you get the impression that this cranky god really loves his little pets, and wishes them the best- although he knows with all his prescience what the grim best is for us hopeless little mortals playing our dangerous games.

It’s a pretty grim book. Those two eternal opiates- sex and power- are pretty much the sole motivation behind everyone in Frédéric and Deslauriers’ circle. Allegiances and philosophies are as mutable as clothing or the shifting light in Paris- everything is exhausted in the pursuit of one of those two endless ends. Flaubert claimed his intent was to write “the moral history of the men of my generation” and if so it’s a bleak assessment. The great upheavals that define 19th century France take place as the background of this narrative (the Revolution of 1848 acting as a center point) but Frédéric is too busy trying to get a piece of ass to really notice. The offstage massacres and thunder of guns in far off arrondisements are purposefully distanced- the “moral history” Flaubert is trying to paint is apparently mass solipsism. The revolutionaries become oppressors when it suits them, the super-rich elite are suddenly populists and social advocates when the unrest in the streets threatens the order of things, the artists sell out, brave men are proven cowards, and all seem to worship some vague form of authority, whether it be social, political, or psychological. Frédéric’s obsessive, life-long pursuit of the phantom-like image of Madame Arnoux can be extrapolated into a rather ripe comment on all of those masses surging about in the streets of mid-19th century Paris- they too were chasing ghosts- the ghosts of the Revolution, Royalism, Socialism, Democracy- all those specters that never seem content to lie in their graves; all those straw men people are constantly trying to revive in the name of some sort of never-achieved utopia. See the Dylan quote above.

But the potential bad taste in the mouth that this kind of judgement on humanity could leave, the awfulness, duplicity, shallowness, stupidity, manipulation, and gold-digging of the people in Sentimental Education, is offset by Flaubert’s lovely, lovely prose, his impressionistic drawing of scenes, his adoration of Paris as an entity of indifferent light and beauty; his Paris, the place where history unfolds under the stoicism of stone arcades, where passions are conceived and destroyed, where markets are set up in the mornings and dismantled in the evenings and alluring smells emanate from restaurants, where gossip flows through the gutters like sewage, and alleys are sunk in aqueous light and the sky is always pale or a vaulted blue or gray and about to rain and the amber evening is refracted through clouds, making all of our selfish human endeavors all the more charming, all the more timeless and endearing; and the Seine is reflecting the gaslights in wavering strands as a tortured lover pines on the Pont Neuf at midnight, and hooves percuss and echo from the cobblestones, and Montmarte is filthy and eternal, and the cafes are greasy and alive with chatter and opaque with purple smoke and the men are in their cravats and top-hats and the women are rouged and bosomy and flush and comely. Flaubert cannot help but adore Paris, despite himself. That mythical stage, that constant setting for so much of the great art that the Western world has produced. Sentimental Education succeeds in coming off like an epic of place, of space and lifetimes, a panoptic portrait of interesting times told in often banal scenes and acts; and the technique, skill, or what have you, of the sardonic, darkly hilarious master Flaubert elevates the book beyond some severe excoriation of the human condition- it makes it a vital work of art, resonant now and probably for all time.