Elena Ferrante admits she has sometimes resented Gustave Flaubert as a misogynist, yet Elif Shafak's new novel turns that ambivalence into its creative engine. Her 600-page book reimagines Flaubert's life through a chorus of female voices, some human and some not. The result is a bold, uneven, often captivating attempt at a love letter to literature.
A novelist's divided verdict on Flaubert
In Frantumaglia, her collection of essays on writing and reading, Ferrante describes Flaubert as a figure she has dismissed as a "misogynist," angered by his creation of a mother as callous as Emma Bovary. In other moods, she wonders whether he lets his female characters voice what women truly think and live but do not dare to write. That split reaction, the reviewer argues, is the most fitting feminist response to Flaubert's novel.
The critic suggests that it is too easy to accuse Flaubert of killing Emma because he cannot imagine another fate for a transgressive woman. He was also a restless, self-doubting writer whose solitude let him step into other people's minds, and that complexity resists simple judgment.
Shafak's chorus of voices
Shafak builds her novel on this tension. An opening chapter shows a devastated Flaubert finishing Madame Bovary, and the book then shifts to Emma, who angrily questions her creator's choices. Rather than having Shafak imitate Flaubert's famous precision, the novel lets Emma summon thirty feminine figures, human or otherwise, that Flaubert encounters from birth to death. Their accounts alternate with a third-person narrator.
The reviewer finds this approach well suited to Shafak's gift for giving voice to unlikely narrators, and admires her storytelling energy even when the whimsy feels excessive. The chapters voiced by Opium and Syphilis strike some readers as too fanciful, while the camel Jamilah's section carries real grief, set against a besieged Paris where zoo animals are slaughtered for restaurants.
Where the novel succeeds and strains
Shafak is most affecting when she portrays Flaubert's emotional life: a mother who struggled to love him after losing other children, a sister whose death he never recovered from, and a niece he allowed to enter an unhappy marriage. Her invented minor characters, including a female murderer and a prosecutor's wife, give the book its liveliest energy and most surprising connections.
The reviewer wishes for more of Flaubert's cold analysis and vitriol alongside the novel's idealism. Still, the book's faith in storytelling as a guide through dark times is one the critic admires, even if it is not always easy to share.