Bouvard And Pecuchet Flaubert

When two copy clerks inherit a fortune, they embark on a new life as professional dilettantes in the unfinished novel by the author of Madame Bovary. First conceived in 1863 and left unfinished at his death in 1880, Bouvard and Pécuchet was to be Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece. It tells the story of two Parisian copy clerks, François Bouvard and Juste Pécuchet, who become fast friends. When Bouvard inherits a fortune, their lives are transformed. Now living on a country estate in Normandy, they are free to devote themselves to intellectual pursuits. Over the course of many years, their forays into agriculture, chemistry, archeology, and drama end in futility. As each endeavor flounders, Bouvard and Pécuchet are increasingly alienated from themselves, each other, and especially the local townsfolk—who grow progressively unhappy with their antics. As the world quickly changes around them, Bouvard and Pécuchet remain beginners in their quest to find a purpose.

Bouvard and Pécuchet are two Chaplinesque copy-clerks who meet on a park bench in Paris. Following an unexpected inheritance, they decide to give up their jobs and explore the world of ideas. In this, his last novel, unfinished on his death in 1880, Flaubert attempted to encompass his lifelong preoccupation with bourgeois stupidity and his disgust at the banalities of intellectual life in France. Into it he poured all his love of detail, his delight in the life of the mind, his despair of human nature, and his pleasure in passionate friendship. The result is “a kind of encyclopedia made into farce,” wholly grotesque and wholly original, in the spirit of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quixote or Ulysses.

In his own words, the novel is "a kind of encyclopedia made into farce . . . A book in which I shall spit out my bile." At the center of this book are Bouvard and Pécuchet, two retired clerks who set out in a search for truth and knowledge with persistent optimism in light of the fact that each new attempt at learning about the world ends in disaster. In the literary tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift, this story is told in that blend of satire and sympathy that only genius can compound, and the reader becomes genuinely fond of these two Don Quixotes of Ideas. Apart from being a new translation, this edition includes Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas.

Bouvard and Pecuchet opens with two middle-aged copy-clerks who become fast friends after meeting on a city bench and discovering their shared habit of writing their names in their hats: "I should say so! Someone could walk off with mine at the office!" When a small inheritance allows Bouvard and Pecuchet to retire early and move to the country, they use their newfound leisure time to satisfy their curiosity about all the things they'd been too busy to study in the city. Flaubert shows his unlikely protagonists diving disastrously into everything from farming and politics to literature and love, and coming up empty-handed each time - until, finally, their obsessive pursuit of knowledge becomes an end in itself.

"Bouvard and Pécuchet" is one of Gustave Flaubert's most well-known works. With its meticulously crafted sentences and precise words, the novel has endured the test of time without losing its impact and expressive power. The narrative focuses on two credulous characters, the copyists, and friends, Bouvard and Pécuchet, who, upon receiving an inheritance, decide to swap Paris for life in the countryside. The result is a series of mishaps, narrated with refined humor and laden with criticism. The structure of the narrative depicts the very obsession with the pursuit of truth as a wheel spinning in vain, amusingly and pathetically involving its two protagonists and all the encyclopedic knowledge of the 19th century. The work " Bouvard and Pécuchet" is part of the famous collection: "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die."

Bouvard et Pécuchet is an unfinished satirical work by Gustave Flaubert, published in 1881 after his death in 1880.

In this satirical novel from renowned French author Gustave Flaubert, two Paris-dwelling clerks, François Bouvard and Juste Pécuchet, have a chance encounter one day and instantly become the best of friends. When Bouvard comes into some family money, the two chums decide to pull up stakes and move to the country to pursue a life of intellectual inquiry. But after plowing through much of the world's literature, poetry, and scientific documentation, the pair grow disenchanted.

Gustave Flaubert BOUVARD ET PECUCHET Oeuvre posthume (parution 1881)

Nowhere do Flaubert's explorations of the relation of signs to the objects they signify reach a more thorough study than in this work. Bouvard and Pécuchet systematically confuse signs and symbols with reality, an assumption that causes them much suffering, as it does for Emma Bovary and Frédéric Moreau. Yet here, due to the explicit focus on books and knowledge, Flaubert's ideas reach a climax. Consequently, the book is widely read as a precursor to modern theories on semiotics and postmodernism. The relentless failure of Bouvard and Pécuchet to learn anything from their adventures raises the question of what is knowable. Whenever they achieve some small measure of success (a rare occurrence), it is the result of unknown external forces beyond their comprehension. In this sense, they strongly resemble Antony in The Temptation of St. Anthony, a work which addresses similar epistemological themes as they relate to classical literature. Lionel Trilling wrote that the novel expresses a belief in the alienation of human thought from human experience. The worldview that emerges from the work, one of human beings proceeding relentlessly forward without comprehending the results of their actions or the processes of the world around them, does not seem an optimistic one. But given that Bouvard and Pécuchet do gain some comprehension of humanity's ignorant state (as demonstrated by their composition of the Dictionary of Received Ideas), it could be argued that Flaubert allows for the possibility of relative enlightenment.

Bouvard et Pécuchet details the adventures of two Parisian copy-clerks, François Denys Bartholomée Bouvard and Juste Romain Cyrille Pécuchet, of the same age and nearly identical temperament. They meet one hot summer day in 1838 by the canal Saint-Martin and form an instant, symbiotic friendship. The work resembles the earlier Sentimental Education in that the plot structure is episodic, giving it a picaresque quality. Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was an influential French writer who was perhaps the leading exponent of literary realism of his country. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary and for his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert.