About this audiobook
Gustave Flaubert follows Frédéric Moreau, a young provincial who arrives in Paris with hopes of love, artistic achievement and social success. His attachment to the married Madame Arnoux becomes a lasting ideal against which he measures the rest of his life. Yet admiration and longing do not easily become decisive action.
Against the upheavals of mid-nineteenth-century France, including the revolution of 1848, Frédéric moves between friendships, fashionable circles, financial opportunities and passing relationships. Ambition repeatedly gives way to hesitation or distraction. Flaubert connects this private history of missed opportunities with the changing hopes of a wider generation.
The novel examines the difference between imagining a meaningful life and making choices that might create one. Its patient observation, irony and psychological detail will appeal to readers interested in French realism, the loss of youthful illusions and the ways desire can become a substitute for action.
