Meanderings on Sentimental Education

I found this one of the most difficult books I've forced myself to complete. . .

This difficulty was almost more interesting to me than trying to figure out why this book is supposedly so great.

Some of my thoughts while reading:
If I were writing a paper on this book and had to come up with a thesis:  Man is a desiring machine who is never satisfied but will stop at nothing to fulfill his desires.

Struggled with this novel because I felt like there was a real tension between what Flaubert was intending to describe and what I was experiencing as I read. I thought I might better understand F's novel if I better understood him (ordered Biography. . . wonder if that will help).

"fantasist at war with reality"  is Flaubert's recurrent theme. Is this how F saw himself? All people? Just the bourgeois?  

"penchant for remote intimacy," and that "he would always feel most himself in the fastness of indefinitely unconsummated love, of longing, of bereavement."

Flaubert frequently went to brothels himself . . . is he critical of them or does he see them as just part of life? Or is he just critical of everything humans do?

He distrusted propriety and taunted the bourgeois

"Flaubert would always remain the Kid, the boy who dropped out of law school and came home and never left again, the writer who likened writing to masturbation (and sentences to ejaculate), and who, late in his life, would claim that "two things sustain me: love of Literature and hatred of the Bourgeois '"

Flaubert creates women that are unattainable, if good, or defiled. 

"The romantic in him wanted to soar above it all, to write a book of pure music, "a book about nothing," a book held together only by the "internal force of its style." F cared less about the people, in theory, then about the writing. The writing itself should be what draws the reader, the content doesn't matter. AT the same time he was quite attached to his characters." 

To what purpose was the writing then? Nabakov says some of the same thing in interviews, but I can never tell whether Nabakov is kidding or being serious . . .

Flaubert has M. Bovary say "all is lies" and this novel seems to reconfirm that (but not the extreme despair of Hardy--it's almost as if he's describing what he sees as opposed to judging it or desiring change of it). Is this really how F views the world or just a satiric exaggeration? And if so, to what effect? Is there supposed to be any effect if the whole purpose of writing is to showcase the style?

 "relentlessly nullifying vision of the book, which finally judges adultery to be as monotonous as marriage, which threatens, by making Homais the ironic victor, to turn the whole world into a mass of platitudes." 

F does not see "good" in man. We are mundane at best and his job is to just to hold a mirror up to us. But this vision is not one that I agree with. Perhaps it is a mirror of F and perhaps F is not a very appealing person.

 "WE have George Sand, it seems, to thank for the existence of "A Simple Heart." In her last years this devoted correspondent goaded him to produce lofty and moral work. People had reviewed "Sentimental Education" poorly, she said, because he had not made clear which character was worth admiring. Flaubert replied that he did not feel he had the right to judge his characters in this way. Sounding like Chekhov, whose "Lady With the Little Dog" would owe something to "Madame Bovary," he wrote that: "Obscene books are immoral because untruthful. When reading them, one says: 'That's not the way things are.' " And in a characteristic coda: "Mind you, I detest what is conventionally called 'realism,' although I have come to be regarded as one of its pontiffs."

From 

Quotes are from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/books/review/16wood.html?pagewanted=all

There are people who act immorally everywhere but everyone is not an immoral person and the novel seems to suggest that most of us are decrepit and without a moral center. Does F see these people as lacking a moral center?