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Marciano Guerrero
Memoirs of a Madman
Memoirs of a Madman
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The Memoirs is a semi-autobiographical book about an early unrequited love experienced by Flaubert. The fair Maria is older than him, married, and has no clue about her admirer’s passion, let alone its intensity.
Smitten beyond reason, the narrator examines his life, what is has been, and what it is—all under the lenses of passionate, carnal desire. His evocations become a raw and painful procession of gloomy, pessimist events. His love for the unattainable Maria exacerbates his solitude, plunging him into madness; hence, the title of the book.
Despite the unfocused style, some meditations are written with unusual depth; especially, if one takes into account that the work was supposedly written when Flaubert was only seventeen years old.
It is quite remarkable that at such an early age, Flaubert had already discerned the eternal struggle between heart and the soul; a theme treated in depth by Plato. Even Pascal addressed it: "The heart has Its reasons of which reason knows nothing." And of course, Nietzsche built his whole philosophical career on the struggle between the Dionysian and the Apollonian forces.
Our translation has removed some of the most offending faults —in both grammar and syntax— commonly found in adolescents’ writing. Some glaring tense shifts have been left there as a testimony that the work isn’t the work of the mature novelist Gustave Flaubert who wrote Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, and Salammbo, but the incipient work of an aspiring, budding writer—young Flaubert at seventeen!
Smitten beyond reason, the narrator examines his life, what is has been, and what it is—all under the lenses of passionate, carnal desire. His evocations become a raw and painful procession of gloomy, pessimist events. His love for the unattainable Maria exacerbates his solitude, plunging him into madness; hence, the title of the book.
Despite the unfocused style, some meditations are written with unusual depth; especially, if one takes into account that the work was supposedly written when Flaubert was only seventeen years old.
It is quite remarkable that at such an early age, Flaubert had already discerned the eternal struggle between heart and the soul; a theme treated in depth by Plato. Even Pascal addressed it: "The heart has Its reasons of which reason knows nothing." And of course, Nietzsche built his whole philosophical career on the struggle between the Dionysian and the Apollonian forces.
Our translation has removed some of the most offending faults —in both grammar and syntax— commonly found in adolescents’ writing. Some glaring tense shifts have been left there as a testimony that the work isn’t the work of the mature novelist Gustave Flaubert who wrote Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, and Salammbo, but the incipient work of an aspiring, budding writer—young Flaubert at seventeen!
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