Recommendations
Books Like Bouvard et Pécuchet
Best books to read after Bouvard et Pécuchet by Flaubert
Readers who respond to Bouvard et Pécuchet's encyclopedic comedy, its systematic satire of human stupidity, and Flaubert's devastating analysis of bourgeois intellectual pretension will find the wider tradition of the comic encyclopedic novel.
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Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary is the essential companion to Bouvard et Pécuchet: Emma Bovary's romantic fantasies and Bouvard and Pécuchet's encyclopedic knowledge-fantasies are both versions of the same Flaubertian diagnosis — the gap between what human beings want to be (which they get from books and received ideas) and what they are (which their experience relentlessly reveals).
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Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote is the founding text of the tradition of the man who confuses the world of books with the world of experience: Bouvard and Pécuchet are the encyclopedic heirs of Quixote, pursuing not chivalric romance but systematic knowledge with the same earnest incomprehension of the gap between the ideal and the real.
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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
by Laurence Sterne
Sterne's eighteenth-century encyclopedic novel is the most immediate predecessor of Bouvard et Pécuchet's method: the systematic digression, the parody of systematic knowledge, and the comic frustration of the human desire to understand everything are all in Tristram Shandy before Flaubert.
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The Man Without Qualities
by Robert Musil
Musil's great unfinished Austrian novel is the twentieth-century encyclopedic heir of Bouvard et Pécuchet: both are novels about a man (or men) who attempt to systematically understand everything and find that understanding is systematically impossible, and both are unfinished because the project of systematic totality cannot be completed.
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's Casaubon, the scholar who spends his life compiling a Key to All Mythologies that will never be written, is the English Romantic equivalent of Bouvard and Pécuchet: the human being whose ambition to systematic knowledge is frustrated by the inadequacy of any single intelligence to the complexity of everything.
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Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov's 1962 novel extends the Flaubertian encyclopedia-satire into the postmodern novel: the accumulated commentary that says less than nothing about the poem it comments on is a Nabokovian version of Bouvard and Pécuchet's accumulated knowledge that reveals only ignorance.
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The Encyclopédie
by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert
The Encyclopédie (1751–77), the great project of the French Enlightenment to systematize all human knowledge, is the founding text that Bouvard et Pécuchet parodies: Flaubert's two clerks are systematically attempting to do privately what the Encyclopédie attempted publicly, and their failure is a critique of the Enlightenment project of knowledge systematization.
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L'Éducation sentimentale
by Gustave Flaubert
L'Éducation sentimentale and Bouvard et Pécuchet are Flaubert's two systematic analyses of human failure: where Frédéric Moreau fails at love, ambition, and politics, Bouvard and Pécuchet fail at knowledge — both novels argue that the gap between human aspiration and human capacity is absolute, and that this gap is the defining comedy and tragedy of the human condition.
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