In the Library
A Sentimental Education
Gustave Flaubert, 1869
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 12 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by D.F. Hannigan
- Chapters
- Chapters 20
- Length
- Length 172k words
£1.99
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What he then saw was like an apparition.
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Gatsby chases the same impossible reunion across water and decades later, proving Frédéric's green light burns on every shore.
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Father Goriot
Honoré de Balzac
Balzac sends a young provincial into the identical Parisian machine of money and ambition, but gives Rastignac the nerve Frédéric never finds.
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About the book
A straw hat, a sunlit deck, a woman bent over her sewing: this is the sight that undoes Frédéric Moreau on a riverboat pulling out of Paris, and it never quite lets him go. Across decades he loves Madame Arnoux with everything he has and does almost nothing about it, drifting through a law degree he never finishes and a revolution he mostly watches from café windows. He settles, meanwhile, for wanting women he doesn't love and refusing to act on the one he does, which turns out to be the same failure wearing two faces. Flaubert times the novel exactly to 1848, so that a nation's hopes rise and curdle on the same schedule as Frédéric's own, and watching him waste his life becomes a way of watching a whole generation waste its chance. When Madame Arnoux comes back once more, her hair gone white, and cuts a lock of it for him, you feel precisely what all that patience cost.