Sentimental Education; Or, The History of a Young Man. Volume 1

On a boat journey home from Paris, a young law student catches sight of a dark-haired woman across the deck. It is the beginning of an obsession that will consume the next twenty years of his life. Frédéric Moreau will never possess Madame Arnoux, will never quite abandon her, will let everything else slip away while he chases the ghost of that first glimpse. Based on Flaubert's own devastating youthful passion, Sentimental Education is the unsparing portrait of a man who mistakes longing for living. As Frédéric circles around the married Arnoux, befriends her husband, drifts through revolutions and business schemes and affairs that mean nothing, the novel asks what happens to a generation that believed in feeling above all else. The result is both a heartbreak of a love story and a ruthless diagnosis of a certain kind of modern soul: the one who spends his life waiting for life to begin.