Bryan's review
Salambo (Penguin Classics)
by Gustave Flaubert
Bryan's review
Salambo (Penguin Classics) by Gustave Flaubert
Bryan's review
rating:
I'm only half-way through this time, but this is one of the most excrutiating, unreadable 'great' novels ... partly due to Flaubert's triumph in stripping everything down to its material essence, avoiding all character psychology, and prompting all of us to ask why we are reading. It is essentially a prose poem that deals with a violent, decadent subject (3rd century Carthage) in a style that for the most part eschews psychology and heroics for multi-layered imagery. Cruelty and conquest are everywhere, but only as images, never as part of an enfolding 'tragic' or 'comic' mode of writing ...
Apparently this was his most financially successful book, and one can imagine readers of the time enjoying page after page of descriptions of unimaginable, vanished Carthage locales and finding themselves transported (i.e. Orientalism). If you are an admirer of Flaubert's ability to transform a static image into a perfect paragraph, then you will find much to appreciate here: soldiers dining...more
Apparently this was his most financially successful book, and one can imagine readers of the time enjoying page after page of descriptions of unimaginable, vanished Carthage locales and finding themselves transported (i.e. Orientalism). If you are an admirer of Flaubert's ability to transform a static image into a perfect paragraph, then you will find much to appreciate here: soldiers dining...more
