Nico
voted on the book list Best books of 2008
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Similar to The Age of Innocence is Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet in that it doesn't actually define an historical act but instead sums up the mood of that time—the insane thirst for knowledge, the quest for understanding that surfaced after the French Revolution, a quest that so often winds up in passionate absurdity.
In my 1954 New Directions translation Lionel Trilling (in the forward) quotes Ezra Pound as saying that the novel "can be regarded as the inauguration of a new form that has no precedents." (Coming from the master of smashing all previous forms, that is high criticism indeed!)
Bouvard and Pecuchet is an arranging of facts, of meaningless pursuits. The two characters are bumblers—ignorant book learners—but their enthusiasm —so important to Voltaire and his ilk—is unmatched. Trilling writes that "they are Faustian; they must try everything, and to no intellectual moment are they able to say their "verwiele doch!"
It is interesting that these types of characters appear so often in different places in 19th century literature. There is of course Don Quixote earlier but there is also Pierre in War and Peace who is so desperate and passionate for anything that will set him free, set him above and removed from the bourgeoise culture around him, and then of course Raskolnikov who murders the old lady fr what? For a release of some sort, for the experience of it...? ]]>
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