Amused, Bored or Exasperated

Christopher Prendergast

• Flaubert: A Life by Geoffrey Wall
  Faber, 413 pp, £25.00, October 2001, ISBN 0 571 19521 0

And so another literary ‘life’, framed, as is the custom, by a beginning (childhood) and an ending (death), although Geoffrey Wall, on retiring from his story, decorates the frame with a nicely incongruous detail: ‘Flaubert’s coffin, too big to fit into the grave, had to be left stuck at an angle, headfirst, and only halfway into the earth.’ Flaubert’s novels are packed with grotesque contingencies of this sort, an ongoing series of petty but obstinate obstructions to human designs. How gratifying, then, that in this lack of fit between coffin and grave, death should confirm a whole Flaubertian way of looking at life. On the other hand, we should be cautious about construing this as a ‘sign’ and consequently, like Emma Bovary, losing the plot in the very act of searching for one. To his credit, the biographer leaves well alone here, in the penumbra of unstated implication.