In One Brief Moment All Eternity by Elif Shafak review – what Madame Bovary thought of Flaubert

This audacious portrait of the French author through the eyes of his women is Shafak’s love letter to literature in dark times

In Frantumaglia, her collection of essays on writing and reading, Elena Ferrante writes that she has sometimes dismissed Gustave Flaubert as a “misogynist”, angered by his invention of as callous a mother as Emma Bovary. In other moods, however, she has wondered whether Flaubert allows his female characters to say what “women truly think and say and live but do not dare write”.

Ferrante’s ambivalence is, I think, the most fitting feminist response to Flaubert’s novel. It’s tempting to castigate him as a male writer who kills his female character because he can’t imagine any other end for a transgressive woman; to reproach him for not giving Emma Bovary the profundity of emotion with which Tolstoy imbues Anna Karenina. But this isn’t the whole story, because Flaubert was so complex a figure: restlessly self-doubting even as he more than held his own in an age of cocksure egos; ecstatically happy in his solitary states of aesthetic creation precisely because they could throw him outwards into other people’s stories and minds.

Elif Shafak’s audacious new novel is written out of this ambivalence. An opening chapter shows a devastated Flaubert killing what the narrator styles as “the only woman he has ever loved with heart, mind and soul”, by writing the end of Madame Bovary. The book then shifts briskly to Emma’s own voice, angry with her creator for denying her the freedom to learn from her mistakes (“Could it be because I am a woman?”). These two visions of Flaubert, teeming with creative passion for his own protagonist on the one hand and an exasperating misogynist on the other, become the twin poles of a vast 600-page novel exploring his life from every possible perspective. Thankfully, Shafak doesn’t attempt to ventriloquise Flaubert himself, master of the mot juste. Instead, she has Emma summon the voices of 30 feminine figures, human or otherwise, encountered by Flaubert between birth and death, and alternates their accounts with that of the third-person narrator.

This is the ideal vehicle for Shafak, who delights and often excels in giving voice to anyone and everyone, including, memorably, the tree protagonist in The Island of Missing Trees. I have always admired Shafak’s storytelling verve while not quite falling for her whimsicality, and I balked slightly at the fancifulness of the chapters voiced by Opium (“Let me lighten up your load, ease the burden. I shall cradle you in my warm embrace”) and Syphilis (“I will damage your cells, burrow into your brain, penetrate your dreams”).

But Flaubert himself might have been drawn to these extremes of literary inhabitation, which are a sort of extreme realisation of his own famous statement to Louise Colet: “It is a delicious thing to write. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind.” Certainly, I fell for Jamilah the camel (“I smile all the time. I cannot help it”), who comes at a point when the reader has either thrown the book aside in exasperation or been carried away by its abundance. “I saw those knives – and I smiled”: Shafak imbues Jamilah’s death with genuine tragedy, at a time when the inhabitants of defeated Paris are murdering zoo animals for restaurants to serve up as gourmet dishes.

Throughout, Shafak powerfully evokes the minute-by-minute sensory experience of a sensitive child, and then of the adult still tragically caught up in his childhood world. She is astute and often moving on the main players in Flaubert’s life: the eventually overbearing mother who she suggests couldn’t quite bring herself to love him as an infant after losing several children before him; the sister whose death he never recovered from; the adored niece he allowed to be pushed into an unhappy marriage, despite understanding more profoundly than anyone in his century quite how unhappy such marriages could be; the lover who “thought I could help him, gently peeling off his loneliness like wallpaper lifted from a tired wall”.

It’s with the invented minor characters that Shafak’s gift for storytelling finds its fullest expression. It’s as though she has tunnelled through Flaubert’s refined stylisation back into 19th-century chaos and exuberance, giving us a female murderer whose sister, passing as male, turns up to tutor the unteachable young Gustave; and the wife of the prosecutor who brought Madame Bovary to trial, laughing here at her husband’s secret hobby of writing pornographic poems. . By the end, Shafak’s powers of narrative invention become a kind of bravura performance, as unexpected, splendidly unlikely connections emerge between minor characters and disparate scenes.

In an author’s note Shafak describes the novel as her “love letter to literature”. Certainly she shares Flaubert’s often idealistic sense that literature can help us even when everything else in our lives and world becomes bleak. “Without stories, without art, our descent into savagery would be even swifter,” she has Flaubert just about convincingly muse. Occasionally, I yearned for more of Flaubert’s cold analysis and sheer vitriol alongside the idealism. But this is unashamedly Shafak’s Flaubert, and I am glad of her faith in storytelling as a shaky light guiding us in dark times, even if I can’t always confidently share it.