The perpetual orgy; Flaubert and Madame Bovary
/ Mario Vargas Llosa
- New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux , 1986
- 239 p. ; 24 cm
The book's first section is a tete-a-tete with Emma Bovary; the second traces the gestation and birth of the novel, as well as Flaubert's method, his mania for documentation, and the novel's literary sources; the third situates it in literary history. Vargas Llosa's first work of non-fiction will send the reader back to Flaubert's masterpiece with renewed interest.