Mario Vargas Llosa Writing About Flaubert and the Novel

 Mario Vargas Llosa and Flaubert were two writers I knew of but did not read until prison. I enjoyed both (although I liked Flaubert's Sentimental Education more than I did Madame Bovary) and learned from both. I suggest them to your attention.

LitHub translated Llosa's All Things Are Possible: Mario Vargas Llosa on the Eternal Youth of Flaubert’s Writing. It is short, I suggest reading it if you are a reader. Writers, I urge their reading.

This was a flagrant yet mysterious break with the past. It consisted of explaining that the ordering element of a story can be an imitation of an all-knowing God, or simply a character who can know no more than what ordinary people like us know about others, with all the fallibility that knowledge implies. In a novel, as in Madame Bovary, there can be a godlike, omniscient narrator and various character-narrators, as long as the limits of each are respected.

At the level of prose, Flaubert always believed that the excellence of a phrase depended on its music and that one out-of-tune syllable was enough for the musical perfection of the phrase—to which Flaubert attributed incantatory qualities—to be lost. The five years he spent writing Madame Bovary were the richest and most creative from the point of view of the structure of the novel. If we are to be honest, the true creator of the modern novel was Flaubert.

I lack the music, or my music is that of a wheezing, out of tune squeezebox, but I know what I lack from reading Flaubert and Llosa.

sch 8/29/22