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The Temptation of St. Antony

Pages: 152

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About this book

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.

About the author

Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary put its author in a Paris courtroom. Serialised in the Revue de Paris in 1856, the novel earned Gustave Flaubert a prosecution for offending public morals and religion; he was acquitted in February 1857 and the book sold hard on the scandal.