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In many ways it's an oddity that this book's rich embroidery of dreams, desires and romantic folly has come to signify the apogee of realism.
What realism there is lies in the way that Flaubert brutally undercuts these fanciful daydreams with the bathos of provincial life in Normandy

These stories veer between the incomprehensible and the terrifying, each page an uncanny and disturbing step along a dark and uncertain path with the mountain above and the icy cliff-edge below...

So much fun.

This is really fun.

So close now. Warsaw, Tristan da Cunha, Akureyri, Toulouse, Onkalo, Olkiluoto, Berlin, Shanghai, Yangshan, Moscow, Ozyorsk, Novaya Zemlya, Cape Verde, Saint Helena, the South Atlantic...
And finally back to Forus and Stavanger...

Reading this late into the night yesterday I realised that it’s in someway an English low land version of Thomas Mann’s the Magic Mountain. But instead of a resort in the Alps, the scene is the English countryside in which we pay witness to the disappeared world of privilege and steadfast conviction that things can and will never change, shortly before that all gets blown up by the first world war.

I think I have developed Stavanger syndrome. I’ve been living inside this book for so long, that I have taken on the ideas and viewpoints of my literary captors.

The end is in sight. Tristan da Cunha has slid out of view. Off to the madhouse!

I have been looking forward to this, curious to experience Flaubert in French!

This book really gets going at around page 750, wow!

And now... the weather. January in Germany really isn't that different from being stranded in the South Atlantic in 1962, it would seem.