The Temptation of St. Antony

Flaubert worked on this strange, visionary book for most of his life, returning to it again and again between his realist novels. Cast as a play meant for the mind rather than the stage, it follows the hermit Saint Anthony through a single night in the Egyptian desert as the Devil parades before him every temptation, heresy, monster, and forgotten god of the ancient world. Lush, hallucinatory, and vast in its learning, it is as far from the cool restraint of Madame Bovary as one author could travel. Readers looking for a plot will be baffled; readers open to a fever dream of history and belief will find nothing else quite like it. Free to download as a PDF or EPUB.