La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y "Madame Bovary"

Second edition. Softcover volume, measuring approximately 5" x 7.5", shows light shelfwear. Binding is sound. Pages are clean and bright. 277 pages.

"There are three ways to criticize a novel, says Mario Vargas Llosa: the first, individual and subjective, due to the impression that the work leaves on the reader; the second, objective, based on scientific pretensions, based on universal rules, analyzing the way in which time and language are made; the third, which corresponds more to the history of literature than to criticism itself, depending on the novels that were written before or after. Each of these positions, applied to " Madame Bovary", constitutes a part of the penetrating study of Vargas Llosa. In the first, the Peruvian novelist evokes his already ancient relationship with Flaubert's novel, in which he is fundamentally interested, as in any novel, its character as a constructed work with rigorous order, its description of objective, concrete and action life, and its thematic characteristics of rebellion, violence, melodrama and sex.In the second part, after investigating the various conditions that gave birth to "Madame Bovary" it analyzes in depth the transfiguration that Flaubert carries out to convert the data of reality into a work of art, through style, from the subject and the characters, as well as from the time and point of view of the narrator. In the third part he presents "Madame Bovary" as the first modern novel. Only a novelist so aware of his profession, and so complex, deep and comprehensive, as Mario Vargas Llosa, has been able to contemplate and analyze the "perpetual orgy" of "Madame Bovary" in all its breadth and unity, up to its ultimate consequences."