Bouvard and Pecuchet - Gustave Flaubert

Bouvard and Pecuchet by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Mark Polizzotti, preface by Raymond Queneau / ISBN 9781564783936 / paperback from Dalkey Archive

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“Among all the works of this brilliant writer, Bouvard and Pécuchet 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)

“In Bouvard and Pécuchet, 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)