In One Brief Moment All Eternity by Elif Shafak review – what Madame Bovary thought of Flaubert

This audacious portrait of the French author through the eyes of his women is Shafak’s love letter to literature in dark times In Frantumaglia, her collection of essays on writing and reading, Elena Ferrante writes that she has sometimes dismissed Gustave Flaubert as a “misogynist”, angered by his invention of as callous a mother as Emma Bovary. In other moods, however, she has wondered whether Flaubert allows his female characters to say what “women truly think and say and live but do not dare write”. Ferrante’s ambivalence is, I think, the most fitting feminist response to Flaubert’s novel. It’s tempting to castigate him as a male writer who kills his female character because he can’t imagine any other end for a transgressive woman; to reproach him for not giving Emma Bovary the profundity of emotion with which Tolstoy imbues Anna Karenina. But this isn’t the whole story, because Flaubert was so complex a figure: restlessly self-doubting even as he more than held his own in an age of cocksure egos; ecstatically happy in his solitary states of aesthetic creation precisely because they could throw him outwards into other people’s stories and minds. Continue reading...