The central gamble of this novel is structural rather than thematic: Shafak refuses to impersonate Flaubert himself — smart, given that he remains the undisputed master of the mot juste — and instead has Emma Bovary summon 30 witnesses to his life, human and otherwise. The result is less a biography than a séance, each voice adding a facet to a man whose defining quality was his capacity to inhabit minds not his own. Shafak is working in a tradition of feminist revisionism that runs from Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea through Pat Barker's Regeneration through to Colm Tóibín's The Master — novels that tunnel into the negative space around canonical figures and ask what was occluded. But where Tóibín's James is rendered with surgical restraint, Shafak goes the other direction entirely: abundance, accumulation, a willingness to voice opium and syphilis as speaking subjects. Whether you find this exhilarating or exhausting is your first real test of whether this book is for you. The chapters voiced by personified substances — Opium cradling Flaubert, Syphilis burrowing into his brain — are the obvious target for skeptics, and the reviewer here is honest that she balked. These passages are the weakest in the novel, not because the conceit is unfair but because Shafak's prose in them flattens into allegory rather than deepening into character. But Jamilah the camel is a different matter. Shafak imbues her death — murdered for a restaurant menu during the siege of Paris — with genuine tragedy, and the chapter arrives at exactly the moment when the reader has decided whether to stay or go. Where the novel earns its 600 pages is in the minor and invented characters: the female murderer whose cross-dressing sister attempts to tutor the unteachable young Gustave; the prosecutor's wife who laughs at her husband's secret pornographic poetry. These figures feel tunneled through from the 19th century itself, not assembled from research. Shafak is at her best when she turns the formal machinery of polyphony over to ordinary chaos rather than grand allegorical statement. The emotional core is Flaubert's relationships with the women closest to him — the mother who may not have been able to love him fully after so much infant loss; the sister whose death haunted him; the adored niece he allowed to be married into misery while understanding better than anyone alive what such marriages cost. Shafak is astute and often moving on these figures. The lover's line — she 'thought I could help him, gently peeling off his loneliness like wallpaper lifted from a tired wall' — is exactly the kind of image the novel earns when it slows down enough to find it. The novel's idealism about literature — that stories protect us from savagery, that art is what remains when everything else collapses — is stated almost too plainly by the end. The reviewer here admits to wanting more of Flaubert's cold vitriol alongside the faith. This is Shafak's Flaubert, warmer and more hopeful than the man on the page of his letters. That's not a failure; it's a declaration. The book is explicitly a love letter to literature, and love letters are allowed to be partial.
