The Literature Network - Writer known to have sought precison and perfection.(BOOKS)

Writer known to have sought precison and perfection.(BOOKS)

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From: The Washington Times
Date: 20060924
Author:

Byline: Bruce Allen, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES

When asked to name the best novel I've ever read, I waffle, mumbling critical cliches regarding "Moby Dick," "Anna Karenina," and "Great Expectations."

If the question becomes, "What's the most perfect novel?" it's hard to deny pride of place to Gustave Flaubert's 1857 masterpiece "Madame Bovary," a tale of provincial adultery and romantic self-delusion possessed of a page-by-page (virtually sentence-by-sentence) structural and rhetorical perfection which neither its meticulous author nor any other novelist has since ...

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