Overview

"Flaubert's unforgettable memoirs of travels abroad At once a classic of travel literature and a penetrating portrait of a ""sensibility on tour,"" Flaubert in Egypt wonderfully captures the young writer's impressions during his 1849 voyages. Using diaries, letters, travel notes, and the evidence of Flaubert's traveling companion, Maxime Du Camp, Francis Steegmuller reconstructs his journey through the bazaars and brothels of Cairo and down the Nile to the Red Sea. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators."

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9780140435825

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Mr. Steegmuller, who has annotated and amplified this collection of notes and letters of Flaubert's Egyptian travels when he was 28, also questions how they served as a point de depart for Madame Bovary which would be written a year later rather than Salammbo - more closely allied by the setting. He has also included some of the commentaries of Flaubert's friend and traveling companion Maxime Du Camp although you wonder whether anyone except the real student-devotee will pause to make juxtapositions. Flaubert, a beautiful young man at that time, one of prominent sensual inclinations as well as great sensibility however overcast (Du Camp was the more energetic, extroverted) left his consuming mother - in loud tears - and set off for the Near Eastern countries which would endure as a state of mind. Head shaved, muffled in a tarboosh, smoking long pipes, drinking coffee on divans, or frequenting the brothels (as he always did) which would also leave him with a more permanent reminder, Flaubert submitted to the limbic and languid atmosphere which diminished his energies as well as his little worldly vanities - i.e. his ambition. Although at times, toward the end, he felt a burning need to write and the book to come obsessed him - Eureka! Eureka! I will call her Emma Bovary! As Steegmuller points out, the journey served to direct him from Romanticism to Realism - borne out by the visual, redolent detail - the moon shining on the minarets of Cairo, although the pyramids are full of bat dung and the Sphinx stained by bird-droppings, Indeed he is graphically realistic - on the deplorable taste of the tombs or the equally deplorable conditions of syphilitics in a hospital. And there are dromedaries and jackals and swarming mosquitoes under those Golden clouds, like satin sofas. And the young man who as a later artist will always defend Art for Art's Sake, will also inveigh against that old whore, literature, ultrascrewed by filthy pricks. There is certainly enough here to indicate the genesis of the great novelist but the memoir stands on its own, as it should, as a record of divers sights and pleasures. (Kirkus Reviews)

When Gustave Flaubert travelled with a friend in Egypt in 1849, he had already become a writer and 'yearned for the East'. He vividly records his rapture on seeing the desert, mosques, pyramids and the sphinx, but is most excited by cities and the people he meets who range from sheikhs to whores, jugglers, snake charmers and acrobats. A lively and entertaining account, which provides much insight into the author's characters. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

"Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821, the son of a prominent physician. The success of Madame Bovary (1857) was ensured by government prosecution for ""immorality""; Salammb (1862) and The Sentimental Education (1869) received a cool public reception; not until the publication of Three Tales (1877) was his genius popularly acknowledged. His final bitterness and disillusion were vividly evidenced in the savagely satiric Bouvard and Pecuchet, left unfinished at his death in 1880."

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