Book of a lifetime: Letters by Gustave Flaubert

From The Independent archive: Ian Sansom on the inspiring correspondence of a writer’s writer

Flaubert’s letters are flecked with witticisms (Getty)

I am, alas, to all intents and purposes, and to my eternal shame, an utterly uneducated, ignorant monoglot. I barely even speak English: I speak Essex. In my mind I sound like Daniel Barenboim delivering the Reith Lectures, or Garrison Keillor, rolling on with another Prairie Home Companion, or Seamus Heaney reciting, or Robin Lustig on the World Service, or WH Auden at the Royal Festival Hall sometime in the late 1960s. But when I speak, I sound like Joe Pasquale. I crush the language. I’ve often tried to learn other languages: Czech; Hebrew; Italian. How else to escape my own voice, and to read the Bible, and Aharon Appelfeld, and Amos Oz, and Bohumil Hrabal, and Dante and Calvino?

I was even lucky enough to go to university at a time when it was still thought fit and proper for a student of English Literature to have a passing acquaintance with the literature of at least one other major European language, so I struggled through three whole years of French. It was either that, fail, or Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. Studying French, I was in the equivalent of the slow readers’ group. We did mostly gobbets – Victor Hugo, Balzac – but were occasionally encouraged to read entire books. Mostly by Jean-Paul Sartre. Qu’est ce que la litterature? I had no idea. I was a teenager. I had enough angst of my own in English.

I packed away La Nausee on the day I graduated and I don’t think I read a word of French for 20 years, until a few years ago on holiday, when I had trouble with a menu, attempting to order a croque monsieur. I was back to square one. I had regressed. It came as a surprise, then, even to myself, when I recently started working my way – slowly, slowly, pathetically slowly – through Flaubert’s correspondence, in the Gallimard four-volume edition.