Sentimental Education (Penguin Classics)
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Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 843.8
EAN: 9780140447972
ISBN: 0140447970
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 432
Publication Date: 2004-10-26
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Studio: Penguin Classics
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Editorial Reviews:
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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.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Masterful
Comment: Flaubert's great 'A Sentimental Education' is one of the great achievements of literary realism. Less stifling perhaps than 'Madame Bovary,' this fine novel portrays the immensely rich and entertaining world of Frederic, the young dilettante and aesthete who falls for the much older and unobtainable Madame Arnoux. Of course this novel is about the complexity of 19th century French society, about the rise of the bourgeoisie, about the revolution. But we read it for its complex and highly refined characters, and its crisp filmic realism. Like Tolstoy, Flaubert was a genius for capturing the smallest details with creativity and color. Who can forget Flaubert's clouds that look like the tips of ostrich feathers? This is a truly timeless masterpiece- a rare totality that combines bold storytelling with delicate grace.
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Summary: Terrible translation
Comment: This translation (Parmee)is terrible. Here is Flaubert, working tirelessly over every line to find le mot juste, and I can't read a single page without flinching from some awkwardly translated phrase.
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Summary: It's No War and Peace
Comment: When is a classic not a classic? Perhaps when a book has too much going for it: brilliant author, contemporary political events that will define the century, a story that is just wonderful. A Sentimental Education has all these things. However, reading it was a little like eating jam on a bed of jam with no toast. Flaubert in this book tells the story of a young man just finishing college and the course of his life until old age--a better title might have been 'A Sentimental Life', because it's not clear that much education happened at all throughout the book. In fact, the protagonist continues to struggle with a life strategy throughout the book that seems to have more cost than benefit. The youth while not poor has been thrust due to his upbringing in somewhat upper crust circles into society where he struggles to maintain his habits and appearance. While doing just enough work to skate by, he sees and falls madly in love with a married woman. The book tells the story of his life-long attempt to get closer to her and his trials, travails, adventures along the way. Unfortunately, instead of writing what could be a novel very similar to Anna Karenina, both in plot and quality of writing, Flaubert stuffs almost as much political history and debate into the book right alongside. Imaging reading War and Peace and any of the War sections were substituted with characters philosophizing, debating the future of France, Bonaparte, Republicanism, and on and on. It would be a rare reader who would want to keep up with all the historic references, mentions of politicians, philosophers, events, theories and more. Split into two books, perhaps each is a winning effort, however together it's a wonderful love story and classical romance with persistent stultifying breaks into French history.
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Summary: Comment dites voux "Love Stinks"?
Comment: Gustave Flaubert's 1869 semi-autobiographical novel about a young man in Paris memorializes the passing folly of youthful infatuation with ample verve and humor. A trifle dense and distant as read today, "Sentimental Education" still packs a lot of power.
Middle-class Normandy man Frederic Moreau is fresh out of college when he spies a beautiful woman on a boat. He resolves at once to make her his own. Never mind that Madame Arnoux is married and lives in Paris. Boosted by an uncle's legacy, Frederic relocates to the City of Light himself, setting out to impress her, her cheating husband, and numerous friends real and fake with his spendthrift lifestyle and high-society airs. It doesn't go at all well for the naive, fixated young man.
He explains his otherwise aimless life to her thusly: "What is there for me to do in the world? Others strain after wealth, fame, power. I have no profession; you are my exclusive occupation, my entire fortune, the aim and center of my life and thoughts."
And his passion for her is the aim and center of the entire novel, from first page to last. As explained in the introduction to the Penquin edition by translator Robert Baldick, the story is taken from Flaubert's own passion, long-drawn-out but perhaps requited, for the wife of a music publisher he met at a similarly early part of his life.
Flaubert never developed much of an interest in any woman whose affections couldn't be bought, and those who detect in him a misogynistic strain will find strong evidence to support that view here. Madame Arnoux plays Frederic cruelly for money and power, as does another woman aptly named "the Marshal", whose introduction at a glitzy dinner party is one of the book's justly famous centerpieces.
"Women's hearts were like those desks full of secret drawers fitting one inside another; you struggled with them, you broke your fingernails, and at the bottom you found a withered flower, a little dust, or nothing at all," Flaubert observes.
But Frederic is a deserving recipient of such heartlessness, as in the way he treats one woman who showers him with honest affection but doesn't count because she's not Parisian. Baldick notes one of the novel's many innovations is in presenting its protagonist as anti-hero, someone we instinctively like though his actions are often base and reprehensible. That's Flaubert's great feat, keeping you rooting for Frederic long after you realize he doesn't deserve it.
Other accomplishments of the author include his descriptions of Paris in the throes of revolution and his ability to extract high drama from mannered tea parties and wayward glances. Not a lot happens in this book, except much talking, and that often centering on gossip and politics, which hardly resonate when read today.
But you care about the story because you care about Frederic, and when you come to the end, realize his lack of true accomplishment is the book's greatest feat. For it is the stuff of everyday life that Flaubert brought to the page, pedestrian perhaps but even more remarkable for what he does with it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Flaubert's Sentimental Education: one reason why life's worth living.
Comment: "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
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