Francis SteegmullerRecensioni

It was ok, for what it was, but not much to it.

A gem of a book not well known but a good read and fascinating for what it reveals of the intellectual ferment in the crucial years of the Enlightenment.½

Excellent work with much first hand information on Apollinaire gathered while friends and associates were still alive.

Caveat: this is not the book 'Madame Bovary.' It is biography of Flaubert focused on explaining how he came to write Madame Bovary.
This book gives you the best of both worlds: Steegmuller did a lot of research, and has interesting things to say about the origins of 'Madame Bovary,' both the book and the woman; on the other hand, it reads like a nicely written novel, except that at the end, instead of 'dear reader, i married him,' you get 'dear reader, he published it.' My only complaint is that it doesn't engage in much discussion of the Madame Bovary the book's actual contents and structure, although he quotes Baudelaire's review, which says something like that you could write about Madame Bovary for ever. I'd love to read Steegmuller's analysis of Bovary, or of the novels that followed it for that matter.

Madame Bovary was a landmark book in the ways it blended romanticism and realism. Yet, its author, Gustave Flaubert despised the minutiae of everyday life, as well as the traditions and morals of society. The story of his life and how he, who despised realism, came to write a monumental novel of realism, is particularly interesting.

Francis Steegmuller wrote his classic biography Flaubert and Madame Bovary, which he calls a “double portrait,” in 1939. There were plenty of things I didn’t like, but this mostly was because of Gustave Flaubert himself. Mr. Steegmuller’s inclusion of lots of M. Flaubert’s personal correspondence gives the reader a better understanding of the author himself. I found this a great way to give the reader a feel for the author’s personality and his writing style. I’m glad I read Mr. Steegmuller biography before I begin rereading M. Flaubert’s most popular novel

A collection of twenty pieces that appeared in The New Yorker beginning in 1944. Steegmuller describes visits to various French towns before the war, what it was like immediately after the war (rationing, mine location, and other matters), and then includes a few pieces that were written about places (usually the States) other than France.
He talks about French provincial life and about the French attitude toward camping before the war (not civilized—not French). He describes the French inability to understand the notion of a temporary (one year) installation of a telephone and the bureaucracy that attaches to the installation and listing of a phone (“Allo, Allo”), as well as other bureaucratic annoyances.
A sad little tale (“Bereft”) recounts a French couple’s wish to hear from their daughter in Idaho, whose American husband wrote to say she was being institutionalized, and the revelation that their son also lives in Idaho, a hundred miles away, and that they, too, have lived in the States, but in New York, never venturing more than a few blocks from the hotel where they worked.
“The Foreigner” describes, in the taxi driver and the commissaire of police, the xenophobia of the French bourgeois.
The non-French entries here include experiences on a bus trip in the Southwest, more trouble with apartments and moving, and a couple of strange pieces about horseback riding and a municipal snake charmer in Cairo.
Steegmuller was a translator and a Flaubert scholar; I believe the first time I read Madame Bovary it was in his translation.½

FLAUBERT AND MADAME BOVARY by FRANCIS STEEGMULLER (1957)

FLAUBERT AND MADAME BOVARY by FRANCIS STEEGMULLER (1957)