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Madame Bovary was the first novel I read in French. I was at secondary school and it was recommended to me by my competent, unprejudiced French teacher. I remember devouring the book voraciously, which left me with a bitter sensation. I noticed a disturbing fleshliness in the work, but what struck me even more was the desolation emanating from the characters, who seemed deprived of humanity. Now, thirty years later, I have re-read it, and strangely enough, the dominant emotions of sadness it has aroused in me are fairly similar to what I felt then, albeit subtler and deeper.
Flaubert faced trial for immorality because of Madame Bovary. The prosecution's summing up is a little masterpiece of subtle, profound literary criticism. In it, the imperial lawyer Ernest Pinard (7 February 1857) revelaed how, in spite of himself, he had been entranced by Flaubert's dense and evocative prose, which, in his opinion, owed its most penetrating power to corrupt to a certain lascivious charm. Nowadays we laugh at all that, and yet even though all the embraces are left to the imagination, this work is still able to captivate the reader and drag him into a deadly area. What can an extraordinarily beautiful and ingeniously innovatory novel have in common with a work of pornography? Perhaps the absence of another on the scene and the chill of the consequent lack of sentiments.
Together with Freud as a Writer by Patrick Mahony, Crescere corvi (the title comes from a Spanish proverb: “If you raise crows, they will peck your eyes out”) is the first work in a new series — “Freud e dintorni” — published by Marietti and edited by Speziale-Bagliacca himself. Apart from works on applied psychoanalysis, in the next few years other works will be published, translated into Italian as part of the new series: Melanie Klein Today, in two volumes, edited by E. Bott Spillius, The Independent Mind in the British