Memoirs of a Madman

Finally getting my first taste of Flaubert in the original French, and I decided to start with something shorter to build myself up to finally getting to read Bovary (which is part of the final motivation for me to begin this attempt to learn to read French to begin with). Mémoires d'un fou is a strange little tome - Flaubert wrote it when he was 17, and once you know this you find it unmistakably the work of a teenage boy... and yet already there were the first shoots of what was to become a great talent.

The book is structured quite oddly - there's a main story of sorts, a first (and frustrated) love that shapes the first person narrator indelibly, yet this also contains plenty of other remembrances/reflections on youth that feel more show more like something from a personal journal, as well as some adolescent philosophy along the way. The last of these three is definitely the worst of the structures and moods the story explores, sometimes becoming quite tedious or trite even though the core mode of thinking is one Flaubert would more or less stick to for the rest of his life with much more development and nuance (and if you ever doubt the extent to which Emma Bovary was in good part a personalisation of Flaubert himself, and his own scathing and mordant wit a kind of self-criticism, you can find it here in barrels). The more nostalgic and melancholic sections on the other hand feel oddly as if they're in an early lineage with what Nerval would do in Sylvie 20 years or so later and which would eventually form the basis of Proust's project, a commonality it's difficult to find between the two great French writers elsewhere.

Already the core elements of the kind of romanticist/realist blend Flaubert would master are in evidence and if at times this made me double-take or roll my eyes, I found that in the closing chapters I was quite moved and that at points the great writer who could turn a phrase as if wielding a dagger into your heart was already in evidence this early on. As much as this is juvenilia, a first draft of a confessional novel that feels very obviously a first draft, it's times like this I'm reminded that however good my own writing may one day get I'm operating a thousand leagues below what Gustave was capable of before he was even fully an adult... depressing for me but at least we all got to experience the benefits.

Also if you're into psychoanalysis you'll get a lot of grist for the mill out of all the sexual elements at play here. Be prepared.
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Found this a really gentle read that I completed in a single day - had to do some word look-ups but this came close to extensive reading. show less

"I'm fourteen and this is deep".

Un libro che ti rapisce. Io ho una mia particolare triade ed è anche quella che credo mi abbia formato a livello letterario. Flaubert, Rimbaud e Joyce.

In questo caso Flaubert mi ha rapito letteralmente e Memorie di un pazzo è un 'opera da leggere assolutamente. Stelline piene ovviamente.