Books about Brombert from Amazon.com

Introduction by Victor Brombert; Translation by Francis Steegmuller.
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Francis Steegmuller’s beautifully executed double portrait of Madame Bovary and her maker is a remarkable and unusual biographical study, a sensitive and detailed account of how an unpromising young man turns himself into one of the world’s greatest novelists. Steegmuller starts with the young Flaubert, prone to mysterious fits, hypochondriacal, at odds with and yet dependent on his bourgeois family. Then, drawing on Flaubert’s voluminous correspondence, Steegmuller tracks his subject through friendships and love affairs, a trip to the Orient, a nervous breakdown and tenuous recovery, and finally into the study, where a mind at once restless and jaded finds a focus in the precisely detailed reality of an imagined woman, utterly ordinary in her unhappiness, whose story was to revolutionize literature. This biographical study is executed with all the precision and vision of a great novel..
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"Richly detailed and informative, ›this biography| exposes the character of an artist who maintained a sharply defined duality between his public and private personas" (Philadelphia Inquirer and "grants us a far deeper understanding of why ›Manet's| paintings outraged so many of his peers" (Booklist, starred review). 70 halftones..
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One might expect a coming-of-age story set in a small Italian fishing village in the 1950s to wax idyllic, but Erri De Luca confounds expectation. Though the novel has more than its share of halcyon days in the sun, a troubling undercurrent runs through it. The unnamed narrator, a 16-year-old boy summering with his family on an island off the coast of Naples, is confronted with Italy's fascist past when he meets Caia, a young Romanian Jew whose family was decimated during the war. As the boy learns more about her circumstances, he demands answers from the adults around him--answers they are increasingly reluctant to give. Only Nicola, a local fisherman who served with the Italian army in Yugoslavia, offers any clues to Italy's complicity:

The war lived on in a few odd details that he would relate over and over again: an empty window seen from the street, and behind the window no house, not even a roof, and you could see the sky. Windows are made to see the sky, but not like that. And there was a market square where grass grew because there was nothing to sell and no one ever went there, not even to exchange a few words. Grass can be a sad thing when it grows between the cobblestones of a market.

De Luca hangs his story on two mirror images: the wartime invasion of Italy by German forces followed, just a few years later, by another incursion--this time of tourists--from the same nation. As Caia relates the realities of life during the German occupation, it becomes harder and harder for the boy to reconcile his country's past with its complacent present. Part love story, part ghost story, Sea of Memory is a haunting tale rendered in evocative prose. --Margaret Prior.
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Italo Svevo's early novel Senilita (1898) remained unknown for many years until James Joyce encountered the novelist in Trieste and came to admire Senilita as a preeminent modern Italian novel. Joyee helped to launch Svevo's career, and years later Svevo achieved great fame with his masterpiece, Confessions of Zeno. In Senilita, Svevo tells the story of the amorous entanglement of Emilio, a failed writer already old at thirty-five, and Angiolina, a seductively beautiful but promiscuous young woman. A study in jealousy and self-torment, the novel traces the intoxicating effect of a narcissistic and amoral woman on an indecisive daydreamer who vacillates between guilt and moral smugness. The novel is suffused with a tragic sense of existence, and the unbreachable distance between one consciousness and another. Svevo's unmistakably modern voice subtly captures rapid shifts in mood and intention, exploiting irony, indirection, and multiple points of view to reveal Emilio's increasing anguish as he comes to recognise the dissonance between himself and his world..
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The story of a stifled woman in a provincial town who dreams of happiness and then perishes by her own hand, provides a profound and moving study of human bondage..
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Victor Brombert reassesses in a modern perspective the power and originality of Hugo's work, and provides a new interpretation of Hugo's narrative art as well as a synthesis of his poetic and moral vision. The twenty-eight drawings by Hugo reproduced in this book are further testimony to the visionary nature of Hugo's imagination..
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Victor Brombert is an unrivaled interpreter of French literature; and the writers he considers in this latest book are ones with whom he has a long acqualntance These essays--eleven of them appearing in English for the first time and some totally new--give us an acute analysis of the major figures of the nineteenth century and a splendid lesson in criticism.

Brombert shows how a text works--its structure and narrative devices, and the symbolic function of characters, episodes, words--and he highlights the distinctive postures and styles of each writer. He gives us a sense of the hidden inner text as well as the techniques writers have devised to lead their readers to the discovery of what is hidden. With wonderful subtlety he unravels the reader's participatory response, whether it be Hugo reading Shakespeare, Sartre reading Hugo, Stendhal reading Rousseau, T. S. Eliot misreading Baudelaire, or Baudelaire, Balzac, and Flaubert reading their own sensibilities. This book is a sterling example of the finest kind of literary criticism--wise, intelligent, responsive, sympathetic--that reveals central aspects of the creative process and returns the reader joyfully to the texts themselves.

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