A Simple Heart moved me to tears.

Russell Baker

A Simple Heart

by Gustave Flaubert

In A Simple Heart, the poignant story that inspired Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot, Félicité, a French housemaid, approaches a lifetime of servitude with human-scaled but angelic aplomb. No other author has imparted so much beauty and integrity to so modest an existence. Flaubert’s “great saint” endures loss after loss by embracing the rich, true rhythms of life: the comfort of domesticity, the solace of the Church, and the depth of memory. This novella showcases Flaubert’s perfectly honed realism: a delicate counterpoint of daily events with their psychological repercussions. “Flaubert is diagnosis,” Ezra Pound wrote, “the whole of Flaubert, the whole fight for the novel as ’histoire morale contemporaine’ was a fight against maxims, against abstractions, a fight back toward a human and/or total conception.”

Paperback(published Apr, 01 1996)

ISBN
9780811213189
Price US
11.95
Trim Size
5x7
Portrait of Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert

19th century French novelist

A Simple Heart moved me to tears.

Russell Baker