Bouvard and Pecuchet with The Dictionary of Received Ideas (Penguin Classics)
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.
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Community Reviews
I think the first third is kinda boring; mostly about physical sciences, medicine. It picks up pace when the French Revolution occurs, allowing Flaubert to really lay on the reader what he thinks of society and the human condition. The clarity helps as a cipher for the rest of the book, dividing what Flaubert thinks is worth a laugh and what he scowls at with all brutality.
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