Bouvard and Pecuchet: Bouvard and Pécuchet
"Among all the works of this brilliant writer, Bouvard and Pecuchet is definitely the deepest, the most thorough, the broadest.... It is the Tower of Babel of the sciences, where all the diverse, opposing, and absolute doctrines -- each having its own language -- demonstrate the powerlessness of effort, the vanity of affirmation, and the ever eternal 'misery of everything.'" --Guy de Maupassant"Flaubert inspires in me an affection that I don't feel for any other writer." --Jean Echenoz"In Bouvard and Pecuchet, Flaubert created an encyclopedia of the sciences in a way that emphasizes all the laws and failures of knowledge, and at the same time, he did so in a way that breaks the forms of literature itself." --Claudine Cohen, Alliage