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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.
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Buy on AmazonMadame 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
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Buy on AmazonThe 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
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Buy on AmazonPère 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
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Buy on AmazonIn 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
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Buy on AmazonThe 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
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Buy on AmazonBuddenbrooks
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
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Buy on AmazonA 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
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Buy on AmazonNausea
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
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