Bouvard and Pecuchet opens with two middle-aged copy-clerks who become fast friends after meeting on a city bench and discovering their shared habit of writing their names in their hats: "I should say so! Someone could walk off with mine at the office!" When a small inheritance allows Bouvard and Pecuchet to retire early and move to the country, they use their newfound leisure time to satisfy their curiosity about all the things they'd been too busy to study in the city. Flaubert shows his unlikely protagonists diving disastrously into everything from farming and politics to literature and love, and coming up empty-handed each time - until, finally, their obsessive pursuit of knowledge becomes an end in itself.

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When two copy clerks inherit a fortune, they embark on a new life as professional dilettantes in the unfinished novel by the author of Madame Bovary. First conceived in 1863 and left unfinished at his death in 1880, Bouvard and Pécuchet was to be Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece. It tells the story of two Parisian copy clerks, François Bouvard and Juste Pécuchet, who become fast friends. When Bouvard inherits a fortune, their lives are transformed. Now living on a country estate in Normandy, they are free to devote themselves to intellectual pursuits. Over the course of many years, their forays into agriculture, chemistry, archeology, and drama end in futility. As each endeavor flounders, Bouvard and Pécuchet are increasingly alienated from themselves, each other, and especially the local townsfolk—who grow progressively unhappy with their antics. As the world quickly changes around them, Bouvard and Pécuchet remain beginners in their quest to find a purpose.

Considered Gustave Flaubert's masterpiece, Bouvard and Pecuchet opens with two middle-aged copy-clerks who become fast friends after meeting on a city bench and discovering their shared habit of writing their names in their hats: "I should say so! Someone could walk off with mine at the office!" When a small inheritance allows Bouvard and Pecuchet to retire early and move to the country, they use their newfound leisure time to satisfy their curiosity about all the things they'd been too busy to study in the city. Flaubert shows his unlikely protagonists diving disastrously into everything from farming and politics to literature and love, and coming up empty-handed each time - until, finally, their obsessive pursuit of knowledge becomes an end in itself." Bouvard and Pecuchet unravels the novel's realist tradition, and sets the stage for the modernist innovations of Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett.

In his own words, the novel is "a kind of encyclopedia made into farce . . . A book in which I shall spit out my bile." At the center of this book are Bouvard and Pécuchet, two retired clerks who set out in a search for truth and knowledge with persistent optimism in light of the fact that each new attempt at learning about the world ends in disaster. In the literary tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift, this story is told in that blend of satire and sympathy that only genius can compound, and the reader becomes genuinely fond of these two Don Quixotes of Ideas. Apart from being a new translation, this edition includes Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas.