The Best Read of Summer, So Far, Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris

Now why would I pick up a book with a title like this?  Am I falling back into that previous theme of minor books by major French authors?  No, after putting the final pieces on the new guest room and having no puzzles in house to divert my attention, I finally went to the library, and, taking the slacker approach to selecting a book, checked out what was hanging on the new non-fiction wall.

This book is the best fiction review I've read.  Period,  Not even trying to remember if there might have been something just as enjoyable in college.  Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris by Peter Brooks focuses primarily on Sentimental Education, a novel Flaubert considered his masterpiece but the public, a flop.  But beyond being literary criticism, Brooks firmly places it in its historical/current events context, a book of deep personal friendship, bloody uprisings, and twin birth of the historical novel genre and modern France.

May 1871, solidly in the Terrible Year, that saw Paris actually burning, and the rise and fall of the Communard.  Flaubert posited that this was not an inevitable crisis, being so self-centered as to say if readers understood Sentimental Education, none of this would have happened.  Which triggered Brooks to analyze the novel as an example of its historical setting as being more important than the main characters ... a new style that seems to me to set the stage for Waiting for Godot and all such opining that finds the main story to be one where the backdrop of place and time fails to go analyzed by the hero.

A thoughtful analysis.  Playing to my need to context from what I perceive to be the overreaction of the press and the public to le temps et le mores.  Should I say at least people are listening or are they merely bombarded with predigested opinion.  Brooks sees Flaubert as placing the protagonist in a turbulent time, sometimes oblivious to what's happening, more often simply carried along, ultimately impacted drastically if not consciously by the events of the larger stage of the drama man calls war, disaster and power.

Rather than a sentimental education, I am looking for a moral education, a calming rationale against which to measure my current events:  failing political institutions, bizarre weather conditions, instant "news" and accusational attempts to set blame rather than find a new course of action.  Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris gave me some breathing space this month ... D C is not burning ... there is still some discourse.  Reading about Annee Terrible of 1871 sets a baseline for defining disaster, causes, for ultimate historical trends both in human evolution and in literature.

Brooks counterpoints his analysis with the letters between Flaubert and his friends, mainly George Sand, a woman whose political perspective differed from his, but who kept their correspondence alive with a Simple Heart.

This book makes me think about having the quiet time to think about what's happening in the world today.  Am I hearing it like Flaubert's characters as just noise around the corner, or can I understand the context is has in my life?  How can I sort out what is truly important, that will end up changing history?