num_pages: 336
description: Bouvard and Pécuchet are two Chaplinesque copy-clerks who meet on a park bench in Paris. Following an unexpected inheritance, they decide to give up their jobs and explore the world of ideas.In this, his last novel, unfinished on his death in 1880, Flaubert attempted to encompass his lifelong preoccupation with bourgeois stupidity and his disgust at the banalities of intellectual life in France. Into it he poured all his love of detail, his delight in the life of the mind, his despair of human nature, and his pleasure in passionate friendship. The result is “a kind of encyclopedia made into farce,” wholly grotesque and wholly original, in the spirit of Gargantua and Pantagruel , Don Quixote or Ulysses .
language: English
title: Bouvard and Pécuchet with The Dictionary of Received Ideas
titlecomplete: Bouvard and Pécuchet with The Dictionary of Received Ideas
genres: French Literature, Novels, Literature, Classics, Fiction, 19th Century, France
ratings_count: 328
publisher: Penguin Classics