A Simple Heart

A Simple HeartIn A Simple Heart, the poignant story that inspired Julian Barnes' Flaubert s Parrot, Felicite, 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

In A Simple Heart, the poignant story that inspired Julian Barnes' Flaubert s Parrot, Felicite, 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."

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: 04/01/1996
ISBN: 9780811213189
Pages: 72
Weight: 0.19lbs
Size: 7.06h x 4.78w x 0.22d

Review Citations: Library Journal 02/15/1996 pg. 180