[Prestidigitweeze]

I'm amazed at how few people reread their books. If a book is terrible or mediocre, I stop reading it. If it's superb, then I savor it and will definitely read it again. Great books (by my own standards, not anyone else's) are often so rich that they seem like entirely different books to me the second time.

I backed up my copy of Bouvard et Pecuchet because the Polizzotti translation is so excellent I know I'll use it for reference, and because I wanted to be able to use my Sony Reader's French-English dictionary whenever I read or reread it. Same with Lydia Davis's translation of Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time.

Few authors of any vintage write fools as well as Flaubert. Everyone else either makes them sentimental props (Dickens) or snickers at them like adolescents at a fart joke (Nabokov), whereas Flaubert exacts complete sympathy from us even as he makes us laugh at appallingly bad decisions. And because his language is so richly internal (new terms had to be invented to describe certain of his syntactical leaps and devices), each new translation brings more of his nuances to light.

He's thoroughly inside his character's heads, and shows us the validity of every point of view, which is why the completeness of his characterization makes me go back again and again to learn from him. Same with George Eliot, who also manages the trick of balancing empathy with observation and intelligence.