Sentimental Education

Gustave Flaubert · 1821–1880 · France

Originally L'Éducation sentimentale (French)

Why it matters

A generation's political and romantic hopes dissolving across the 1848 revolution: the novel of drift, of history as anticlimax. Kafka reread the last pages endlessly; its deadpan disappointment is the modern novel's secret tone.

At a glance

Deliberately anticlimactic structure and dense historical backdrop of the 1848 revolution.