The travel season is upon us, and France provides the coordinates for three imaginative journeys, which remind us of the power of fiction to create for the reader worlds which are at once strange and familiar, truer than life. Bon voyage!
The father of the modern novel comes to life in all of his contradictions in this comprehensive biography, which includes set pieces on Norman history, medical science, agricultural practices, and so much more—in short, the world that Flaubert would render in ruthless and loving detail in Madame Bovary, the novel from which so much modern fiction descends. Literary style was for him “an absolute way of seeing things,†and in fact he taught readers how to see—the details that transform a woman given to romance into a permanent fixture in our mental landscapes. And the mark of this biography's success? You want to go out and read everything that Flaubert wrote—again and again.
