Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert

In this novel we follow the life of Frederic Moreau, a young provincial Frenchman through the middle years of the nineteenth century.

Frederic is from the country, but moves to Paris to study law. His apathy for his studies is matched only by his extravagant spending habits and his obsession with the wife of an associate, Madame Arnoux.

Frederic spends much of his study time skipping classes and spending himself on quixotic bursts of social interaction with the intelligentsia and pursuit of a position in society through courting the affections of those members of the upper classes to which he can gain access. Not exactly a tried and tested course to academic success, but certainly a tried and tested course to minor society standing, if you have the right background.

Through the course of the book Frederic is fairly equally divided between socializing, pursuing his amorous desires, or both. He occasionally returns to visit his family and friends in the country but this leads only to more amorous involvements.

In the background of the years covered by this novel the French revolution is raging. Frederic and his friends are not greatly affected by this, it seems, except where they choose to involve themselves directly in the violence of the mob. Frederic sees the revolution pretty much like everything else, another channel through which he might pursue greater social standing or exploit it in his love life.

Frederic and his intelligentsia friends, and the social elite he surrounds himself with are all constantly in a state of Machiavellian social flux. When they are not slagging each other off, they are in bed with each other’s wives or lovers. These secret machinations again form a large part of the plot of this novel, a scathing accusation on the morals and minds of the society in question.

Will Frederic manage to satiate his desires for Madame Arnoux?
Will he become a society figure?
Can he survive the revolution without losing a duel or being caught in bed with someone else’s wife?
If you can bring yourself to care, the answers await you within “Sentimental Education.”

And so much for the plot.

….That is a plot?

Sigh. What a waste of time this book was for me. Here is one of those books in which one hangs on to the hope that the stunning reputation earned by this piece of literature will be borne out by some enlightening revelation or amazing twist of plot. One continues this hope to within thirty pages of the end of the book, at which time, exhausted and dejected, one is forced to plod through to the bitter end if only to write a thorough review of the piece.

I read this book because it is touted as being one of the finest works of French literature of the nineteenth century. If that is the case, I can only think that such an observation is not particularly high praise.

I was not enamored by really anything which I found within the pages of this book.

As for the plot, my Penguin Classic edition leads me to understand from its introduction that it reflects some of the important events in the life of the author. He too, it seems was obsessed with an older woman, and this is the basis of the obsessions of the central character. Whilst there is nothing fundamentally wrong with this as a premise, when one bases the shape of an entire plot on the misbegotten machinations of a post-adolescent fool one ends up with little more than scribble for orchestrated plot development. This book left me feeling it had really moved nowhere from its beginning to its ending, like its protagonist.

None of the main characters really molds their life into a shape that a reader will be inclined to carry away in the imagination. Whilst this might be part of the whole point, it is too post-modern an experience for me, I like more structure, unless I have already been led to expect a post-modern experience and prepared for it. I spent most of the book wondering what the point was.

As an English speaking reader unfamiliar with French names, my own experience of the names of some of the main characters was that they were so similar as to cause frequent confusion. Two of Frederic’s best friends are named Dussadier and Deslauriers. This you might feel is no cause for complaint, only a sign of my own ignorance. I would agree. But I haven’t finished. I would go on to say that it is of no particular import whether or not one distinguishes the characters effectively, as they are little more than tokens to represent various echelons of society, and they have for the most part about as much individual personality as ants.

The females in this book are all cast in the same mold also, distinguishable, again, only by the social status they enjoy. All are scheming after one man or another, and eyeing up one fortune or another. They fall in and out of love with the pantomime facility of pulp fiction romance caricatures and have lives in two dimensions, Madame Arnoux aside. The book is misogynistic throughout, again, not to my tastes. Indeed, the book concludes with Frederic and his closest friend making the observation that the best interaction they ever had with women was when they only dealt with prostitutes.

I can only say that one would have to be fairly well acquainted (and therefore presumably interested in) the French revolution in order to find the number of discussions of the politics of the day to be of any interest. Again, the passage of time and the unfamiliarity that the common man (that’s me folks) has with this period makes such in-depth debate a thorn in the side of pleasant and entertaining reading. Whilst I enjoy novels set in all kinds of time periods, this novel seeks to illustrate the absurdity of manifestos on all sides. Whilst this is doubtless a noble goal the tedium of the dialog goes far beyond the point of striking the necessary chord, and to steal a word from the original language of the novel, spirals into ennui long before halfway through the story.

Alas, then, I have little to recommend this to you. Life is short, all too short, and we may only read so many books, and in classics, given the attention required frequently to such illustrious reportage, even fewer per month than other forms. This being said, unless you are a scholar of the French revolution, or a 150 year old French misogynist I don’t think this is going to take you anywhere.