I’m almost certain nothing happens in Sentimental Education. Okay,
that’s not fair. Things happen, the 1848
Revolution in Paris happens. It’s more
that the characters don’t do anything.
The main character, Frédéric Moreau, especially seems inclined to do
nothing of note. Strangely, this doesn’t
make Sentiment Education a bad
book. It’s a wonderfully written
hedonistic tale of a man who has more money than sense and a whole group of
people who seem to make it their life’s work to do as little as possible.
The main love story, if you can call it that, is mostly just
a parody of romance. On about page two
of the book, Moreau encounters Mme Arnoux and falls wildly in love. It’s the love at first sight kind of love
that may be more accurately described as lust but the language that Gustave
Flaubert uses is so ridiculously over blown that we’re in comfortable parody
ground. It continues much in this way
throughout the rest of the book. There’s
one bit particularly that reminded me of my time studying the old Middle
English courtly Romances; “he loved her with reservation, without hope,
unconditionally… it was a longing for self-sacrifice, a yearning for
self-destruction, and it was all the stronger because he could not gratify
it.” As I said, the whole book continues
in this vein with Moreau leading on and then abandoning various women all the
while pining for Mme Arnoux. In the end,
he discovers that his love is requited, but neither party has any intention of
doing a thing about it. Parody though it
may be, it was dreadfully gloomy to read over my Christmas break.
I’m not really sure about the politics and the history of
the book. If I’m honest, my knowledge of
French history stops after about 1793 and then restarts in a patchy sense
around beginning of the 20th century- and most of that’s based in
films and world wars. There are
barricades in the book, in the revolution going on in Paris when the book is
set so I assumed it was the same one that Victor Hugo bangs on about in Les Misérables, but according to
Wikipedia it’s not. The French had
confusing amount of revolutions. The
main characters in Sentimental Education show
about the same level of understanding as I do about the thing, so that didn’t
really help further my knowledge of it either.
Moreau shows at best a passing interest, a morbid fascination with the
corpses in the street and I find this amazing; that anyone can be so
indifferent to the politics that affects them.
All the politics in the book is filter through Mademoiselle Vatnaz, the
only character interested in the events and, in what is a pretty interesting
and revolution view for a novel published in 1869, votes for women. I like Mademoiselle Vatnaz.
This is another book that I’ve found it difficult to write
about. It’s very much a book of its
time. I think it’s one of those stories
that would have been hilarious in 1869, but with time and distance so much of
the humour is lost on me because I’m not aware of the things that Flaubert is satirising. I don’t know that much about 1840s Parisian
society and so my experience and enjoyment of the book are limited; had I not
been taught about courtly Romance and so known how to spot it, this would have
affect my experience of the love story between Moreau and Mme Arnoux too. It’s so frustrating when I find books like
this; ones that I know are good and want to enjoy far more than I can because
it’s simply impossible to know everything, so really there’s nothing that can
be done about it.
Next time with Christmas holiday read number four, it’s the
return of Toni Morrison. This time with Jazz.
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