In Frantumaglia, her collection of essays on writing and reading, Elena Ferrante writes that she has sometimes dismissed Gustave Flaubert as a “misogynist”, angered by his invention of as callous a mother as Emma Bovary. In other moods, however, she has wondered whether Flaubert allows his female characters to say what “women truly think and say and live but do not dare write”. Ferrante’s ambivalence is, I think, the most fitting feminist response to Flaubert’s novel.
It’s tempting to castigate him as a male writer who kills his female character because he can’t imagine any other end for a transgressive woman; to reproach him for not giving Emma Bovary the profundity of emotion with which Tolstoy imbues Anna Karenina. But this isn’t the whole story, because Flaubert was so complex a figure: restlessly self-doubting even as he more than held his own in an age of cocksure egos; ecstatically happy in his solitary states of aesthetic creation precisely because they could throw him outwards into other people’s stories and minds. Elif Shafak’s audacious new novel is written out of this ambivalence.
An opening chapter shows a devastated Flaubert killing what the narrator styles as “the only woman he has ever loved with heart, mind and soul”, by writing the end of Madame Bovary. The book then shifts briskly to Emma’s own voice, angry with her creator for denying her the freedom to learn from her mistakes (“Could it be because I am a woman?”). These two visions of Flaubert, teeming with creative passion for his own protagonist on the one hand and an exasperating misogynist on the other, become the twin poles of a vast 600-page novel exploring his life from every possible perspective.
Thankfully, Shafak doesn’t attempt to ventriloquise Flaubert himself, master of the mot juste. Instead, she has Emma summon the voices of 30 feminine figures, human or otherwise, encountered by Flaubert between birth and death, and alternates their accounts with that of the third-person narrator. This is the ideal vehicle for Shafak, who delights and often excels in giving voice to anyone and everyone, including, memorably, the tree protagonist in The Island of Missing Trees.
I have always admired Shafak’s storytelling verve while not quite falling for her whimsicality, and I balked slightly at the fancifulness of the chapters voiced by Opium (“Let me lighten up your load, ease the burden. I shall cradle you in my warm embrace”) and Syphilis (“I will damage your cells, burrow into your brain, penetrate your dreams”). But Flaubert himself might have been drawn to these extremes of literary inhabitation, which are a sort of extreme realisation of his own famous statement to Louise Colet: “It is a delicious thing to write.
Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind.” Certainly, I fell for Jamilah the camel (“I smile all the time. I cannot help it”), who comes at a point when the reader has either thrown the book aside in exasperation or been carried away by its abundance. Throughout, Shafak powerfully evokes the minute-by-minute sensory experience of a sensitive child, and then of the adult still tragically caught up in his childhood world.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
