By Staff Writer
This latest novel from acclaimed Italian author Giuseppe Cafiero is a wry and racy journey through the world of French writer par excellence, Gustave Flaubert.
Gustave Flaubert: The Ambiguity of Imagination is part of Cafiero’s acclaimed ‘ambiguities’ series, which offers surreal and metafictional accounts of the lives of great authors and artists such as Edgar Allan Poe (The Ambiguity of Death) and Vincent Van Gogh (The Ambiguity of Madness).
Cafiero refers to this singular treatment as ‘bio-fiction’, a genre of his own creation and which is best defined as the playful interchange of truth and fiction in a broadly biographical account of its subject.
Rather than presenting a serious trawl through the life of the controversial, and somewhat seedy, Madame Bovary author, the novel takes its lead from a minor footnote in the works of Flaubert.
One of the books that Flaubert had planned to write, but never did, was entitled ‘Harel-Bey’, which as his letters attest would have been set in Middle East. In The Ambiguity of Imagination, that decision comes to haunt him – literally – as the titular Harel-Bey pops into existence with a huge grudge against his creator, both for leaving him a mere rough sketch and for writing him as a blind man.
Described by Cafiero as an “Arab who spent his life in the salon of the frères Goncourt, authors of a famous Journal, where he was born in an evening of drunkenness and carousal from the fervent imagination of Monsieur Gustave Flaubert”, Harel-Bey embarks on a voyage of discovery through the author’s oeuvre and correspondence, in the company of one Monsieur Bouvard – star of another unfinished Flaubert work, Bouvard et Pècuchet.
Like a spurned child, he has one mission in mind – to wreak revenge against the fully fleshed-out protagonists of Flaubert’s published novels and stories. In doing so, he visits locations described in Flaubert’s novels, and meets some of the characters therein, including the famed Madame Bovary.
Told in epistolary form, the novel – translated from the original Italian – is rich in period detail and liberally sprinkled with direct quotations from Flaubert’s works and letters, as well as deliberately evoking the distinctive literary style of the French writer himself.
The novel does hang – somewhat loosely – around the plot concerning Harel-Bey, but the real joy is in the fascinating, semi-biographical peek into the mind of a great writer and the fruits of his imagination.
However, to get the most out of this singular novel, its many allusions and references, it’s best that the reader should already have, or seek, acquaintance with Flaubert’s works beforehand.
Gustave Flaubert: The Ambiguity of Imagination by Giuseppe Cafiero (Clink Street Publishing) is available now on Amazon UK, priced £9.99 in paperback and £2.84 in Kindle Edition. Visit www.giuseppecafiero.com