The 3 best books by Gustave Flaubert

One of the writers who best found the balance between form and substance (the ideal of every writer to be able to catch demanding readers in the richness of language and also those who allow themselves to be carried away by a good background), was Gustave Flaubert.

In his youth, Flaubert could well represent the current young man from a wealthy family who is intended to be guided towards an academic training that would determine a promising future (even more so in those days when few young people could afford to study).

However FlaubertDespite trying to graduate in law, his mind was occupied by the concerns of the latent creator. Literature was his path, even though he was still not entirely clear on it.

In fact, few clear things appear in the life path of the great writer. Nothing about an urban life in which to thrive as the son of, nor notorious public love relationships, beyond a stormy decade of rapprochement and resignation with the poet Louise Colet.

Come on, the stereotype of a nonconformist that only in a field such as literature could find a channel for his concerns and placebo for his emotional and intellectual calm.

And despite Flaubert's unstable and brittle appearance, his work had that long-anticipated quest for perfection, perhaps in contrast to his own troubled world.

Top 3 Recommended Novels by Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary

As a pure novel, no other work approaches the pinnacle of El Quijote how are you. The construction of a character as complete and complex as Emma Bovary manages to fill every scene. Everything revolves around Emma and her fight against the predestined. The persistent misfortune hangs over Emma, ​​marked by the impositions of her times.

And thanks to this, the foundation of what for Vargas Llosa it would be the best underground plot that moves a novel, the four great rivers:

  1. Rebellion, Emma's that leads her to face the storm of her circumstances.
  2. Violence: that which arises from disenchantment, from the impossibility of finding happiness, from the general moral imposition against the individual.
  3. Melodrama: Emma, ​​as a character she is a whole. When the reader discovers the total character and is able to empathize with him, the narrative becomes a melodrama of its own that transcends the reading and splashes the soul of the reader.
  4. Sex: Recognizing the power of the story of sex splashing an intellectual activity such as reading is an infallible binomial not only to energize a story but also to bring the drives closer to the intellect.

Emma is perhaps the first great female character freed from the ideal that weighed down and limited women.

Madame Bovary

The temptation of San Antonio

Flaubert's spirit navigated between uneasy concerns, those types of concerns that can now bear fruit in something positive as they end up paralyzing or distancing us from the rest of the world.

This novel, halfway between a philosophical exposition and a Dantesque adventure, brings us closer to the theater of the human, to life as a sum of histrionic characters out of nothing, to the infernal hand that makes everything approach the failure of existence and death.

The devil's temptation makes a lot of sense in this setting. Giving in to the devil knowing that nothing in the theater of life can satisfy you more is too easy. Not succumbing to it is just a matter of feeling good about yourself and believing that there may be something that justifies the hardship, without even remotely imagining what it could be.

The temptation of San Antonio

Memories of a madman

Despite what may be deduced from the title, this title precisely embraces the ideology towards lucidity. A man restructures his reality, decomposes it.

When he manages to get rid of his identity, he can finally live his glorious delirium, an imaginary space in which he achieves fame, glory, sex and luxury. A complete madman who achieves everything without any suffering from his abandoned physical existence.

Others like him call him crazy, the reality may be that everyone else is crazy, at least those who do not participate in this fantastic world created and that has its true reflection on other social levels.

The upper social classes are the ones that ultimately contemplate others with the security and complete certainty that they go around like crazy looking for what they will never be on this side of reality.

Memories of a madman
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