/lit/ - Literature

>>18177558
you meant to post this

Based or cringe?

>As if the soul’s fullness didn’t sometimes overflow into the emptiest of metaphors, for no one, ever, can give the exact measure of his needs, his apprehensions, or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes to which bears dance, when we ache to move the stars to pity.

I just finished with Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, and the first volume of Sartre's biography of him. In my mind, Flaubert is one of the great understanders of humanity--its heart and its mind.

He neither stoops to the slick sentimentalization of human life, as Dickens often did, nor is he wholly without grace (as the legion of pessimist novelists which dominate the modernist lit which followed, and came from Flaub). He does not moralize (as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky often did) nor does he point a resentful finger at God or lack of God (as Melville did). He does not let his style fly away into aestheticism as Joyce and Nabokov did, and yet his style is without flaw (Yes, I have read him in French, but it shows in English too). These are all writers that I admire in their own way, but Flaubert fills a gap i didn't know was there till now. He writes with a masculine grace which is familiar with both beauty and pain. The only other writers who comes close for me is Chekhov, and the best of Cervantes (though he is flabby and often overly sentimental at his worst). I often see him described as misanthropic, (especially when people talk about Madame Bovary) but in a way I find his work uplifting because he does not pretend that humans are benevolent, he does not ennoble, he knows they can be selfish, stupid, destructive, etc., and yet he does not condemn them either.

>>11328615
Imagine my satisfaction coming back to this thread w/ 200+ replies

What are Flaubert's strengths as a writer that put him at, or near the top of the greatest novelists? I'm starting to see him mentioned here more amongst the greats like Joyce, Tolstoy, Proust, etc.

How does one train oneself into being a great writer? I always hear this fat frenchie as an example of a regular dude who wrote classics through sheer hard work and dedication. What habits did he have? How did he, and others, do it?