Recommendations
Books Like Sentimental Education
Best books to read after Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
Sentimental Education is the anti-novel of the nineteenth century — Frédéric Moreau's failure to become anything in particular, told with an irony so comprehensive it finally implicates the reader who was expecting a more conventional story of ambition and success. If the novel's devastating precision and its portrait of a man who watches his own life pass without quite committing to it moved you, these books share its concern with the comedy of self-deception, its interest in history as a spectacle the individual watches rather than shapes, and its willingness to follow a protagonist to the furthest reach of their mediocrity.
- 1Buy
Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
The essential companion — Emma Bovary's romantic self-destruction in provincial Normandy; Sentimental Education is in many ways Flaubert's response to his own earlier novel: what happens when the same romantic self-deception operates in a male rather than female protagonist, in Paris rather than the provinces, and ends not in suicide but in comfortable mediocrity
- 2Buy
The Red and the Black
by Stendhal
The essential counter-argument — Julien Sorel's energetic rise through the same Restoration France Flaubert ironizes; Stendhal's Julien does everything Flaubert's Frédéric fails to do, and reading the two together gives the full picture of what the French novel made of the ambitious young man in Paris: the success and the failure of the same ambition
- 3Buy
Père Goriot
by Honoré de Balzac
The essential Balzac — Rastignac's energetic decision to beat Paris at its own game; Sentimental Education is Flaubert's ironic response to the Balzacian novel of social conquest: Frédéric has the same Paris, the same class tensions, and the same social opportunities as Rastignac, but completely lacks his energy and decisiveness
- 4Buy
In Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust
The essential successor — Proust's reconstruction of the past from the perspective of a narrator who also failed to act decisively in the crucial moments; where Sentimental Education ironizes the failure of experience to add up to anything, In Search of Lost Time reconstructs that failure as the necessary precondition for art
- 5Buy
The Ambassadors
by Henry James
James's novel about Lambert Strether's belated education in Paris — the most important American parallel to Sentimental Education in the tradition of the novel about a man who arrives at understanding too late; where Flaubert's Frédéric is passive without insight, James's Strether is passive with increasing intelligence about what his passivity has cost him
- 6Buy
Buddenbrooks
by Thomas Mann
Mann's novel about the decline of a German merchant family over four generations — the most important German parallel to Sentimental Education in the tradition of the novel about the relationship between artistic sensitivity and worldly failure; both are organized around the gap between aspiration and achievement
- 7Buy
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
Joyce's novel about Stephen Dedalus's artistic formation — the most important modernist response to the tradition Sentimental Education belongs to; where Flaubert ironizes the education of sensibility, Joyce takes it seriously; reading both gives the range of what the bildungsroman can do with the question of whether formation produces anything
- 8Buy
Nausea
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre's existentialist novel — the twentieth-century French philosophical heir to Sentimental Education's portrait of a man who cannot quite decide to exist; where Flaubert's Frédéric is passive because he cannot commit, Sartre's Roquentin is paralyzed because he has committed to seeing contingency too clearly
More Sentimental Education Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.