Sentimental Education (Penguin Classics)

Book Description

Based on Flaubert's own youthful passion for an older woman, Sentimental Education was described by its author as “the moral history of the men of my generation.” It follows the amorous adventures of Frederic Moreau, a law student who, returning home to Normandy from Paris, notices Mme Arnoux, a slender, dark woman several years older than himself. It is the beginning of an infatuation that will last a lifetime. He befriends her husband, an influential businessman, and as their paths cross and re-cross over the years, Mme Arnoux remains the constant, unattainable love of Moreau's life. Blending love story, historical authenticity, and satire, Sentimental Education is one of the great French novels of the nineteenth century.

Customer Reviews:

Flaubert's Sentimental Education: one reason why life's worth living. .......2007-10-05

"I want to write the moral history of the men of my generation-- or, more accurately, the history of their feelings. It's a book about love, about passion; but passion such as can exist nowadays--that is to say, inactive." --Flaubert on Sentimental Education.

Best known for his novel, Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert's (1821-1880) last novel, Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale, 1869) is not only my favorite Flaubert novel, but one of my all-time favorite novels. Drawn from Flaubert's personal experience (and youthful passions) and set in Paris from 1833 to 1869, it describes the life of Frédéric Moreau and his enduring love for an older, slender, dark woman, Madame Arnoux. Wheras Frédéric is an impoverished law student from provincial France, Mme [Marie] Arnoux is the married mother of two children, who moves to Rome by the end of the novel. Throughout the novel, Frédéric is more interested in experiencing intimacy with Mme Arnoux than his studies. She becomes a symbol of unattainable love, and for Frédéric the path to disillusionment, making this one of the greatest coming-of-age stories of all time. Flaubert was a man of letters who earned his living by the sweat of his brow, known for laboring an entire week over a single page of his writing. He despised clichés and inexact phrases. All of this is apparent when reading Sentimental Education, which in my opinion is a perfect novel. Is Sentimental Education worth reading? Well, Woody Allen fans may remember that his character in Manhattan included this novel as one of his reasons why life's worth living.

G. Merritt

A novel about unfulfilled promise .......2006-09-11

The personal story of Frederick Moreau and the political setting of mid-19th century Paris reflect one another in the unfulfilled promise of his obsession with a married woman and the revolution's unfulfilled promise of reform and change.

The novel offers little in the way of character development and that may be the entire point. Since Moreau's sentimental obsession with Madame Arnoux drives the action to a large degree and he never lets go of it despite his experience he is a study in arrested development. He lives through tulmutuous times , witnesses fortunes made and lost and yet in the end returns with his boyhood friend to where he began and seems to have absorbed no lesson from any of it.
Flaubert's prose is eloquent and at times incredibly poetic in it's descriptions of settings and expression of feelings and the translation here is excellent.

The Best Novel to Come Out of Second Empire France.......2006-08-23

Even better than "Madame Bovary", this is the best novel to emerge from Second Empire France. A story of youthful dreams dashed and great expectations frustrated, this is Flaubert's attempt to tell the moral history of his generation, a generation that saw its hopes raised by the revolution of 1848 and then dashed by the the Napoleonic coup d'etat that established the (at first very popular) Second Empire of Napoleon III. But it's much, much more than a political or moral novel. This is one of Western literature's great explorations of love as desire and disappointment, love as frustration. The erotic, as in Stendhal's "Charterhouse of Parma," parallels the political. The hopes of the best will always be frustrated, but we are doomed to live, condemned (in the words of that great Flaubertian, Jean-Paul Sartre) to be free. Flaubert concludes that the happiest moment in a man's life comes before he is even a man, when his illusions remain intact, before he crosses the threshold into his first brothel. The brothel, then, becomes Flaubert's ultimate metaphor for our prostituted world.

A brilliant novel by the author of Madame Bovary is a tour de force of mid -19th century French fiction.......2006-08-04

This novel was published in 1869 by Gustave Flaubert and was
always fated to play second fiddle to Madame Bovary. The novel
tells the story of Fred Moreau (something of a male Madame Bovary whose heart, heart and life are filled with whimsical
daydreams of fame, fortune and love). Morea has an unfulfilled lust for the rich and married Madame Arnoux. His quixotic quest of this very ordinary woman is told as social comedy, satire and
wit by the brilliant Flaubert.
Moreau pursues several wisps in the wind of his ambitions:
He dreams of becoming:
a lawyer; a politician; a novelist; a rich aristocrat with a
beautiful wife and home in the provinces and a world traveller.
He achieves nothing in his wasted life running through a huge
inheritance on wine, women and song. The complications he involves himself in with prostitutes, middle class ladies
and wealthy women provide wheel within wheel for those readers
who enjoy soap opera shenanigans.
The book has a huge ensemble cast and it is sometimes hard to keep the characters apart. Long discussions are held concerning
every topic imaginable from social structure, French politics,
art and literature. I found it best to forget the somewhat static plot and let the impressionistic strokes by Flaubert
help me paint a mental picture of post-Revolutionary Paris.
This book takes some getting used to but it is worthwhile if
the patient reader will let his/her mind be guided by the master
novelist.
This book was loved by Franz Kafka and reminded me of the work
of Balzac and Marcel Proust.
The introduction in the Penguin Edition as well as the translation is well done,

A "Regular People" Review.......2005-11-24

This book is great, easy to understand by the average person, the plot moves along at a good pace and the ending is very good. You need to read this book...and keep me updated!

A Sentimental Education: The Story of a Young Man (Oxford World's Classics)

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DREADFUL Translation - go for Penguin Edition
Wanting it all
Surprisingly modern
A superb translation of a perfect novel
A refreshing cold bath of realism

A Sentimental Education: The Story of a Young Man (Oxford World's Classics)
Gustave Flaubert
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0192836226

Book Description

Set against the backdrop of the 1848 Revolution, A Sentimental Education is the story of young lawyer Frederic Moreau's infatuation with the demurely exotic Madame Arnoux.

Customer Reviews:

DREADFUL Translation - go for Penguin Edition.......2006-06-02

SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION is one of the glories of literature. While its context seems more dated than that in MADAME BOVARY, its language has the engaging richness of Flaubert in full glory. Knowing it and loving it, I decided it was time to reread it. Trusting to the word "Oxford," I bought and began this edition. Poor Flaubert must truly be spinning: this version is studded with the very sort of cliches that would have been anathema to him. After suffering through several of them, when I read that "his grand passion for Madame Arnoux was beginning to peter out", my patience for this version "petered out." I jettisoned this copy and ordered the also available PENGUIN CLASSIC edition with translation by Robert Baldick. I strongly urge you to select the Penguin rather than the Oxford World's version.

Wanting it all.......2004-02-24

Frederic Moureau is a young man who wants it all... he wants the great romantic life, the social commitment, the financial success, the respect from everyone. This is the perfect example of what a novel is, if we are to accept Lukacs definition of it as the epic of the ages with no gods. There is nothing in this young man's life that gives a sense of totality to his world... there are many ways to be followed, but none to actually enclose in itself the sense of the eternal horizon of time. As he meets Mme. Arnoux, one could think, by the way he thinks about her, that she is going to be his entire world, but she is not... a few moments later we find him completely devoted to the cause of his friends, and later, to his physical involvement with a woman of doubtfull reputation... etc, etc. Along with his discovery of the world and its mechanics, he submerges in his own feelings, without really finding a north to any of his purposes in the external world (be it the world of social dynamics, ambitions, of affections and of responsabilities). His journey begins when he leaves his birthplace in the country and goes to Paris. In this travel, he knows Mme. Arnoux, and then, her husband, with whom he relates very well. Once established in Paris, he keeps this relationship, in hope allways to see the wife.
From that point on, he will get involved in projects of papers, bussiness trades, purchases and social awareness. As the revolution falls upon the city, he tries to get a role in it, but he is soon rejected because of his previous (and allways ambiguous) relations with the burgouise spheres of Paris.
The end of the novel will have him remembering his awakening as a man: he goes to a house, where he can pick from a group of women... but the horizon of possibilities offered by all of them frighten him and he ends up running away... being followed by his best friend; who will allways have to run following Frederic... the one with the money.

Surprisingly modern.......2001-07-07

The American author, Thomas Wolfe, wrote that one of the keys to life was to "get reason and emotions pulling together in double harness". This novel by Flaubert could be said to examine the consequences of letting emotions take over completely.

We are presented with a world in which hedonism, materialism and narcissism take precedence over truth, and care and respect for others - the only value system is self-gratification. Other people have no intrinsic worth.

Given its take on life, I found this a novel to have a curiously modern feel - it reminded me in parts (in approach if not style)of Bret Easton Ellis. The initial surprise was that it was written so long ago. However, when one considers the socio-economic changes prevailing at that time, I questioned my surprise. Is it strange that a critique of the "unacceptable face of capitalism" (and one may add politics) should come at such a time?

The real value of "A Sentimental Education" is that it's a reminder that at various periods of history, some people do pause and reflect on human progress and the price we pay for it - does "progress" have any worth unless our values develop too?

A superb translation of a perfect novel.......2001-05-26

This is simply one of the most satisfying novels I have ever read. And the Parmee translation is excellent - there is not an awkward word or phrase anywhere in the text. Flaubert loved to write fiction which captured the pettiness, baseness, and stupidity of human relations. Misanthrope might be too harsh a word for Flaubert, but he certainly didn't have much patience for the sort of crass greed and shallow, unquestioning conformity he witnessed as a young man in Paris in the Revolution of 1848. I understand that Flaubert started working on this novel very early in his career, but abandoned it several times before finally bringing it to pres in 1869. The care and time Flaubert took in writing this novel shows, especially when you compare it to Madame Bovary, Flaubert's famous book. Bovary is an easier book to "understand". Flaubert may have felt misunderstood. Bovary can be read as an attack on the bourgeoisie, their dull, conformist lives, and the stupid and ultimately self-defeating passions they indulge in an effort to escape from the suffocating monotony of their existence. Or it can be read, as most readers tend to read, as a morality tale about the tragic consequences of adultery. The Sentimental Education sets the record straight, however. Flaubert was not a moralist preaching on the sins of adultery in Bovary. This novel makes that obvious. Here Flaubert again takes up an attack on the bourgeoisie, this time leaving no room for misunderstanding.

I once met someone (a literature student specializing in 19th century fiction, no less!) who complained to me how boring she thought the Sentimental Education was. So boring that she never bothered to finish it. To this day I believe she approached the book in the wrong frame of mind. She may have been expecting some Balzac-ish bildungsroman, about the provincial who comes to Paris and grows into a society man. Instead, she discovered a novel about a dull provincial who comes to Paris thinking he is going to grow into a society man, but is such a poor judge of human character and relations that he meets defeat at every corner. But it is one thing to say the book is dull. It is another to point out that Frederic Moreau is a very dull human being. But then, we remember... we know people like Moreau. At some point or another, we all may have even behaved like Moreau. And we know and live in a society composed of people like the rest of the characters. Moreau's world is the world of bourgeoisie. 150 years later, in another language on another continent, I am surprised to see how little some things have changed.

Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, has analyzed this novel extensively (see "The Rules of Art" and "The Field of Cultural Production") because he finds the document perfect for sociological analysis of the bourgeoisie and the intellectual communities that developed in Paris in 1848. Flaubert had a brutally frank eye and pen, quick to capture the most subtle social implications in a single gesture. After reading Flaubert and Bourdieu, I am haunted by how persistent and relevent Flaubert's vision of society and human relations continues to be.

A refreshing cold bath of realism.......2000-11-22

This is one of those books that every college Freshmen should read. No novel protrays intellectuals more accurately than this one. Flaubert documents their vanity, their dishonesty, their pettiness and their depravity. He shows us what really awful human beings they are. Young people well advised to read the novel before entering the college scene. It will help them enter the academic world with at least some inkling of what the majority (admittedly, not all) intellectuals are really like.

Book Description

This is the long-awaited first book-form result of the author's pioneering interdisciplinary research on a key problem for understanding Chinese texts, and, therewith, China: its ways of expression of emotions and states of mind.

Relying on his immense database on (mostly) Ming and Qing sources, the author here presents the first truly solid, source-based survey on the subject.

Book Description

A law student in Paris dreams of professional success, but his aspirations turn toward amour upon a chance encounter with a married woman. Set amid the revolution of 1848, Flaubert's masterpiece combines political and social upheaval with scrutiny of individual motives in a compelling blend of romance, history, and satire.

Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (Public Planet)

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Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (Public Planet)
Doris Sommer
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Latin American Literature and Culture, No 8)

ASIN: 0822333449

Book Description

Knowing a second language entails some unease; it requires a willingness to make mistakes and work through misunderstandings. The renowned literary scholar Doris Sommer argues that feeling funny is good for you, and for society. In Bilingual Aesthetics Sommer invites readers to make mischief with meaning, to play games with language, and to allow errors to stimulate new ways of thinking. Today’s global world has outgrown any one-to-one correlation between a people and a language; liberal democracies can either encourage difference or stifle it through exclusionary policies. Bilingual Aesthetics is Sommer’s passionate call for citizens and officials to cultivate difference and to realize that the precarious points of contact resulting from mismatches between languages, codes, and cultures are the lifeblood of democracy, as well as the stimulus for aesthetics and philosophy.

Sommer encourages readers to entertain the creative possibilities inherent in multilingualism. With her characteristic wit and love of language, she focuses on humorâparticularly bilingual jokesâas the place where tensions between and within cultures are played out. She draws on thinking about humor and language by a range of philosophers and others, including Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt, and Mikhail Bakhtin. In declaring the merits of allowing for crossed signals, Sommer sends a clear message: Making room for more than one language is about value added, not about remediation. It is an expression of love for a contingent and changing world.

Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (Barnes & Noble Classics)

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Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (Barnes & Noble Classics)
Gustave Flaubert , and Kathleen Rustum
Manufacturer: Barnes & Noble Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1593083068

Book Description

Considered one of the greatest French novels of the nineteenth century, Sentimental Education blends brilliantly realized details of a tumultuous time and place with the intimate story of a lifelong romantic obsession, one that closely mirrors the central passion of Flaubert’s own life.
Set amid the violent social upheaval of the Revolution of 1848, the novel tells of young Frédéric Moreau’s idealistic attraction to a married woman some years his senior. Smitten by his first sight of Madame Arnoux, Frédéric idolizes her for many years, despite her refusal to encourage him and his own indecision. He befriends her husband, an art dealer, in order to be near her, and soon finds himself drawn first into Jacques Arnoux’s heady social circle and then into his disastrous financial speculations.
As a young teenager, Flaubert himself became romantically obsessed with a married woman with whom he kept in touch for the rest of his life, and many of the characters in Sentimental Education, including Madame Arnoux, are based on friends and acquaintances of the great French author. In this vivid novel, all are beset by financial difficulties, ideological conflicts, and friendship betrayed as their lives are changed forever by the revolution.

Sentimental education (Everyman's library, [No. 969])

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Sentimental education (Everyman's library, [No. 969])
Gustave Flaubert
Manufacturer: E. P. Dutton & co., inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: B0006APTQE

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The Sentimental Education of the Novel
Margaret Cohen
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Weimar and Now : German Cultural Criticism)

ASIN: 0691095884

Book Description

The nineteenth-century French novel has long been seen as the heroic production of great men, who confronted in their works the social consequences of the French Revolution. And it is true that French realism, especially as developed by Balzac and Stendhal, was one of the most influential novelistic forms ever invented. Margaret Cohen, however, challenges the traditional account of the genesis of realism by returning Balzac and Stendhal to the forgotten novelistic contexts of their time. Reconstructing a key formative period for the novel, she shows how realist codes emerged in a "hostile take-over" of a prestigious contemporary sentimental practice of the novel, which was almost completely dominated by women writers.

Cohen draws on impressive archival research, resurrecting scores of forgotten nineteenth-century novels, to demonstrate that the codes most closely identified with realism were actually the invention of sentimentality, a powerful aesthetic of emerging liberal-democratic society, although Balzac and Stendhal trivialized sentimental works by associating them with "frivolous" women writers and readers. Attention to these gendered struggles over genre explains why women were not pioneers of realism in France during the nineteenth century, a situation that contrasts with England, where women writers played a formative role in inventing the modern realist novel. Cohen argues that to understand how literary codes respond to material factors, it is imperative to see how such factors take shape within the literary field as well as within society as a whole. The book also proposes that attention to literature as a social institution will help critics resolve the current, vital question of how to practice literary history in the wake of poststructuralism.

Una educacion sentimental, Praga/ A Sentimental Education, Prague (Letras Hispanicas/ Hispanic Writings)

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Una educacion sentimental, Praga/ A Sentimental Education, Prague (Letras Hispanicas/ Hispanic Writings)
Manuel Vazquez Montalban
Manufacturer: Ediciones Catedra S.A.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Sentimental Attachments: Essays, Creative Nonfiction, and Other Experiments in Composition (CrossCurrents Series)

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Sentimental Attachments: Essays, Creative Nonfiction, and Other Experiments in Composition (CrossCurrents Series)
Janet Carey Eldred
Manufacturer: Boynton/Cook
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0867095830

Book Description

"This book was written first and foremost for other writers..." begins Janet Carey Eldred's extraordinary work of blended genres. For Eldred, teachers of writing need to experience the art and craft of composing creative nonfiction and essays firsthand, exploring multiple perspectives, genres, styles, modes, structures, and subjects. They will be at their best, she argues, if they enact what they profess.

Sentimental Attachments opens and closes with important and passionate arguments about why teachers of composition must also be writers of what Eldred calls "lived experience." At its center, however, the book offers a series of lyrical, evocative, exploratory essays that address a range of essential and complex questions:

How do we compose our personal and professional identities?
How do we represent our different selves without compromising other parts of our lives-and, perhaps even more important, the lives of others?
How do we maintain a strong voice in the world without losing sight of other people, places, histories, and ideas?

Like others who defy the conventional view that we must hold the personal separate from the political - or the professional - Janet Carey Eldred believes that teachers of writing must compose themselves as they help others to compose. "We are living drafts in progress," she writes, and in Sentimental Attachments, she models the kinds of composition and revision that make life - and the life of writing and teaching - meaningful.

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