Trois Contes par M. Gustave Flaubert (French Edition)

The stories have powerful mouthpieces and their innermost themes dance with vigor at Flaubert's deft call. One has to be a sworn cynic to deny Flaubert, his versatility and adroitness.

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• Three Tales.
• Il mio piacere proibito (Italian Edition).

But even the best architect in this world cannot lay claim without sumptuous debate on completeness of a house having chosen to withhold a fourth wall to his structure. The three walls, in this story, also could not undermine the importance of a fourth wall on my dwelling tastes. While the stories ran with unrestrained velocity, the stability that imparts gravitas to their colossal mass was missing.

While I could sense Flaubert's great passion as a beaming halo behind his two characters, Julian in The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller and Felicite in A Simple Soul , the characters themselves did not assume a life of their own despite their manifold perditions. Regard me with pessimism if you wish but my limited observations indicate that the greatest characters have risen from the flames of failures and damnations. And Flaubert's miserly shower of these redemptive pulses on his characters seemed like outright injustice to their etching. I wish I had peppered a prayer on my lips, standing by Julian's hours of penance; may be, straightened a few wrinkles on the fatigued brows of Felicite's loneliness.

But not before taking the idiosyncrasies of loulou surreptitiously in my bag, who went on to adorn the chief mantle in Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot! View all 25 comments. I would like to register a complaint about this parrot, what I read about not half an hour ago in a Flaubert short story. What's wrong wiv it? I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my good man. It's representing the Holy Ghost, that's what's wrong with it. The rest of this review is available elsewhere the location cannot be given for Goodreads policy reasons.

View all 15 comments. This collection of longish short stories is Gustave Flaubert's take on saints' lives. The stories go chronologically back in time from 19th century France, to the Middle Ages, to the New Testament. This may be surprising from an author who wrote about people with less than moral lives and who was well known for being critical of the Catholicism of his time. However, the three stories contained in this book are brilliant.

The first story, "Un coeur simple" A Simple Heart , is about a saint who is This collection of longish short stories is Gustave Flaubert's take on saints' lives. The first story, "Un coeur simple" A Simple Heart , is about a saint who is in all ways an unknown, a nobody. Lacking in education, she overflows with affection for her difficult mistress, Mme Aubain, and the two children of the family, Paul and Virginie. As the children eventually drop out of her life and her world shrinks around her, the one joy of her dull existence is a parrot which she names Loulou.

She loves it so much that it eventually takes on a rather intense religious significance.

The child of doting parents, Julien very early on becomes addicted in a frighteningly sadistic way to the extermination of animals for sport, and becomes a great hunter. Having ignored a baleful warning issued by a miraculous stag, he commits a horrendous crime, and in penance renounces the world to become a hermit and a ferryman. Then a mysterious stranger comes to trouble him and the interaction between them is truly strange. He goes over the biblical narrative but adds stunning visual descriptions, background details and minor characters to flesh it out. What links these three tales is a fascination with small, sparkling details.

An exotic aura surrounds the stories, even when the setting is as unromantic as the Normandy of Flaubert's time. There is a sense of fatality which directs the lives of the respective saints to their inevitable conclusion, a scene of apotheosis. In all three cases, this is an ambiguous and even erotic, but ultimately unforgettable moment.

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Flaubert's tales are still influencing literature today. Loulou, the parrot of "A Simple Heart," was the inspiration for Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot , a comic detective novel mixed with abundant reflections on Flaubert's life and works. I wonder what "l'oncle Gustave," that irascible, inscrutable, lascivious, high-strung old curmudgeon, would think if he knew that his stories had fathered such progeny.

Would he be surprised? But then again, maybe not. View all 10 comments. Flaubert describe las personas, su cabellera, las manos, la ropa, los vestidos, los zapatos, los animales, el interior de las casas, las partes del mobiliario, los adornos, los ambientes, los bosques, las calles, las plazas, los edificios, todo. Creo que es donde quiere inferir el significado de lo que narra.

Fiel, leal, trabajadora abnegada, Felicitas es exactamente opuesta a la quijotesca Madame Bovary forma parte del mundo que mejor sabe describir Flaubert: Sinceramente, sostengo que es un cuento impecable, no tiene fallas.

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Jan 10, Hadrian rated it really liked it Shelves: Two masterpieces out of three isn't bad. OK, maybe I'm being a bit unfair to ol' Gus. Then the John the Baptist story seems mediocre by comparison, like a watered-down Salammbo. Two brilliant tales are more than many of us could ever hope for. View all 4 comments. Jul 15, Cecily rated it really liked it Shelves: Beautiful, vivid tales with a mythical feel - almost epic, which is an achievement given their brevity.

Jun 27, Sidharth Vardhan rated it liked it Shelves: Other two stories are ignorable. I have the fire department coming around later for a lecture on electrical safety.

Trois contes by Gustave Flaubert

Apparently, my unplugging policy needs revising. For fifteen years of my life, I never unplugged a single plug even in multisockets and encountered no raging conflagrations in my boudoir except in the bed—wink wink. That you must ALWAYS unplug your appliances at night in case spontaneous friction occurs and the whole neighbourhood burns to a crisp! So, lookin I have the fire department coming around later for a lecture on electrical safety.

So, looking forward to that. I bet no one out there in GR land obsessively unplugs all lamps and computers and kettles before going to bed. View all 8 comments.

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In cima al palco si tolse il velo. Era Erodiade, come al tempo della sua giovinezza. Poi si mise a danzare. Come quando la padrona deve prendere una decisione dopo la morte della figlia. Tutte le piccole cose di lei occupavano un armadio a muro nella camera a due letti. La signora Aubain andava a guardarle il meno possibile. View all 5 comments. View all 7 comments. With his allegedly "immoral" first novel Madame Bovary Flaubert established himself as a leading exponent of the budding realist approach to literature with its emphasis on the sometimes sordid details of everyday life.

This edition of Flaubert's late "Three Tales" features a high-profile guest foreword by Margaret Drabble, as well as an introductio With his allegedly "immoral" first novel Madame Bovary Flaubert established himself as a leading exponent of the budding realist approach to literature with its emphasis on the sometimes sordid details of everyday life. This edition of Flaubert's late "Three Tales" features a high-profile guest foreword by Margaret Drabble, as well as an introduction by translator Howard Curtis.

Both emphasize the fact that these short stories are a distillation of Flaubert's craft and reflect the two extremes of his literary style. The collection opens with "A Simple Heart", a blow-by-blow description of the life and hardships of humble Normandy servant Felicite. The detached, sphinx-like third person narration is tantalisingly ambiguous - are we meant to feel sorry for the protagonist? Contemptuous at her ignorance? Angry at her too easy resignation in the face of adversity?

Or should we admire her humility and loyalty? Much is made of Felicite's quasi-blasphemous mental association between the Holy Ghost and her stuffed parrot.

Said parrot makes a final appearance in the final pages, when Flaubert abandons the matter-of-fact storytelling in favour of a glimpse of the dying protagonist's ecstatic visions. What are we make of this? It is unlikely that the secularist Flaubert wanted us to take these mystic passages at face value - on the other hand, the heightened language suggests that rather than being demented ravings of a gullible old woman, these "visions" give Felicite a hard-earned dignity at the moment of death.

Certainly, for an anti-clerical agnostic, Flaubert's tales show a strange fascination with religion. This Hesperus classics edition is highly recommended, particularly for Howard Curtis's idiomatic translation, which was nominated for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Como, de resto, acontece na realidade! May 27, Charles Dee Mitchell rated it it was amazing Shelves: Flaubert tells the lives of three saints in styles suited to their times yet always unmistakably his own. He relates the story of Felicite, an illiterate servant loyal for her lifetime to her undeserving mistress.

The nineteenth century French countryside Flaubert made his own in Madame Bovary provides the setting and his analytic but never condescending prose produces a realist masterpiece. For the medieval story of St Julian Hospitaller, Flaubert creates his own version of a tale from The Gold Flaubert tells the lives of three saints in styles suited to their times yet always unmistakably his own. For the medieval story of St Julian Hospitaller, Flaubert creates his own version of a tale from The Golden Legend , the great compendium of the lives of the saints.

Three Tales is a stylistic showcase, but also a remarkable experiment in uniting such disparate material and styles to present a cohesive and thematically rich literary work. Sep 18, Vanessa Wu rated it it was amazing. Flaubert is a rather cruel and beautiful writer who fascinates me. In these three stories you can find little morsels of his life's great preoccupations, which he developed further in his novels. In Un Coeur Simple a simple heart , his subject is a selfless and stupid peasant woman. For Flaubert it was a great intellectual and aesthetic challenge to shape something of enduring beauty from the rough material of the everyday and the banal.

It was a challenge he was to pursue with obsessive tenacit Flaubert is a rather cruel and beautiful writer who fascinates me. It was a challenge he was to pursue with obsessive tenacity in Madame Bovary. In this tale he succeeds so brilliantly that it is impossible not to love this woman with a simple heart whose dying vision is of a gigantic stuffed parrot.

One of the things that fascinates me about Flaubert is his restraint. For such a wild hedonist, who takes obvious pleasure in depicting scenes of barbaric passion, how can he write such controlled sentences, such careful, elegant, perfect paragraphs? In the midst of his passion, he is as remote and unfeeling as a statue in the desert.

That's why I call him cruel.

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He can weep and feel sorry for his characters but there is a part of his nature that is forever detached, ironic, superior and disdainful. He is a very great writer, though. I've read this book roughly fifty times now over the past five years, and I'm totally sick of it.

Got one month to write a big paper on it, and then I'll be finished with it forever! Don't get me wrong: Apr 02, Anh rated it liked it Shelves: It had been some years since I'd read Flaubert. Which, in retrospect seems odd to me as I really remember loving the two novels of his that I'd read in the past-- Madame Bovary in college which supplies an epigram for my first collection of stories, Poison and Antidote and, as background for my Ph. So, why do I tarry to read the remainder of the master's works?

Why do I not turn to It had been some years since I'd read Flaubert. Why do I not turn to a tome penned by good old Gustave more frequently? Dunno, probably has something to do with marketing. Indeed it was, for, without having read the tale "A Simple Heart" I'm sure Barnes's rambling novel of Flaubertian criticism, literary fetishization, and a seasoning of personal heartbreak would have meant a bit less without the first-hand background, even if that novel is more or less self-contained.

Flaubert's tales are quite a bit better than Barnes's po-mo encounter with them and the ephemera his novel's narrator picks through in avoidance of telling us his own story. The theme I found linking these three disparate tales was Christian service. That is to say they seemed to hit that heart of Christian belief, that most Christ-like of all attributes, that most self-professed Christians wholly lack, the ability to give something of themselves to others without hope of reward and without coercion.

For human beings are distinctly unworthy most of the time vis-a-vis our moralist tendencies to harp on others' flaws while ignoring our own. Human beings are selfish, contradictory, and cowed by conformity to societal norms and particular situations. Plus our modern capitalism is diametrically opposed to this aspect of an early stage of Western Christianity; capitalism tears us apart as people through competition and materialism, encouraging hostility and suspicion of others rather than togetherness and mutual service.

If you're looking for a reason for all these mass shootings, look no further than the effects of the profit motive and the jealousy created by wealth inequality--oh, yeah, and all the guns lying around just waiting to be used. It's not strange then that the panorama of service presented in the three stories--a woman born to serve who does so without complaint, a Christian saint who dooms himself to service in order to make up for a grievous, oedipal-like sin, and lastly, the story of Herodias and John the Baptist's followers, who all appear hapless servants of the forces of fate.

It's a bit odd to me how much I enjoyed these Christian tales even though I'm a confirmed atheist. I felt about them exactly the opposite way I felt about Bulgakov's Biblical revision scenes in The Master and Margarita , which I also read recently. I guess because Bulgakov was trying to bring a new reality to the obviously fairy-tale versions of events in the Bible itself, to legitimize and modernize the stories for contemporary literary taste--a ridiculous enterprise, despite the great talent of the writer--I received Flaubert's story, revised saint's life, and Biblical re-telling, as a kind of slap in the face of the modern hypocritical post-capitalist Christian reader.

That is to say, Flaubert's three tales throw an abandoned aspect of Christianity in the face of modern Christians who have, for the most part, left service and obsequiousness behind long ago in favor of power, the proud exploitation and manipulation of their fellow man, slavery, coercive moralism, aggressive self-suppression through law and policing and militarism, racism, self-hatred, divisionism and world domination--much of our contemporary nastiness might be said to spring from our culture's abandoning of voluntary, mutual service for the construction of hierarchies of power that force us to serve and therefore despise servitude through various forms of violent and coercive domination.

Jun 26, C. A Simple Heart is a naturalistic story in the style of Madame Bovary , but perhaps told with more kindness towards the protagonist though personally I think Flaubert was pretty kind to Emma anyway. It was quite lovely, but I don't think it succeeded as well as Emma because it was shorter and its subject less morally suspect.

Though that implies that the reason Emma is so good is because of its sensational aspect, which is not true. It's the way he deals with someone behaving so The other two stories were unlike anything I've ever read before. The Legend of St Julian Hospitator is effectively a legend, and as such didn't really make sense. According to the introduction, it was supposed to have a similar effect to a stained-glass window depiction of the life of a saint, and I think it succeeded in that.

Difficult to identify with, though. Herodias I found to be written in a very confusing style - it seemed to contradict itself often and say things that didn't quite make sense. Also I got all the characters confused, especially since many of them seemed to have two or three names. However, it was fascinating from a historical perspective. Mar 11, Cynthia rated it it was amazing Shelves: He lived in a Catholic country during a religious era. Apparently in order for him to become a saint he had to first be very, very bad.

The story felt immediate and alive. View all 3 comments. These three short stories are an interesting little set.

I tend to rate the stories differently, as they vary in quality. The first story, "A simple heart" is very good, with some lovely descriptions of rural France along with the character of Felicite. Loulou the parrot also makes his appearance. It has overtones of the Arabian Nights in it's style and mystical elements. It concerns John the Bap These three short stories are an interesting little set.

It concerns John the Baptist and his beheading. It was a little confusing to me in parts. All these stories were worth reading, and I would rate this little volume 3. It was originally a paperback, and was converted to a more durable hardbound by I assume the library which now possesses it. Time for something a bit more elevated, classics-wise. Typically detached and modern-sounding. Felicite' is a close cousin to the bewildered old peasant lady from the country fair in "Madame Bovary. Kindle Cloud Reader Read instantly in your browser.

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