Bouvard and Pécuchet: A Tragi-Comic Novel of Bourgeois Life, Part 2
1881
When two middle-aged Parisian clerks come into a modest inheritance, they abandon their tedious office lives to pursue every branch of knowledge known to man. Agriculture, medicine, philosophy, art, religion, politics nothing escapes their earnest, catastrophic attention. They attempt to master each field with the confident mediocrity of men who have never been told they can't do something. The results are invariably disastrous, yet what could be merely cruel becomes something else entirely in Flaubert's hands: a portrait of such tender, bewildered humanity that you cannot stop reading about two men who cannot stop trying. Part unfinished masterpiece, part savage indictment of bourgeois self-improvement, Bouvard and Pécuchet anticipates every podcast bro trying to 'optimize' his way to enlightenment. The novel bleeds comedy and tragedy from the same wound: the gap between what we aspire to be and what we're capable of becoming.
