Jack Gavaghan

"I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it" once said Flaubert.

"I feel, against the stupidity of my time, floods of hatred which choke me. Shit rises to my mouth as in the case of a strangulated hernia. But I want to keep it, fix it, harden it; I want to concoct a paste with which I shall cover the nineteenth century, in the same way as they paint Indian pagodas with cow dung" also said Flaubert.

Somewhere between scatological distillation of the times and escapism Three Tales is as good an intro into Flaubert as any, 'A Simple Heart' points toward the social realism of Madame Bovary and all the nulling fatalism that implies, whilst  'Saint Julian the Hospitalier', and 'Hérodias' evoke the more hallucinatory exotica of The Temptation of St. Anthony and Salammbô where mirage gives way to further mirage. The collection captures some of the contradiction of the man, who produced stories with such clockwork regularity from his parochial home-town Rouen, that the passing boats on the Seine used the lights of his overlooking writing haunt for navigation in the dark. All the while he may well have been recollecting, half-dreaming his venture abroad into the Near East with Maxime Du Camp.

Flaubert's Parrot expands on the brief blurb above, as its protagonist Geoffrey Braithwaite muses on life and aims to get a deeper insight into Flaubert the man, a tale in the vein of Huysman's La Bas or Houellebecq's Submission. 

1 paperback copy of Gustave Flaubert's Three Tales and 1 paperback copy of Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot, comes with a free Concrete and Deadbeats zine.