The Emperor’s New Mind

The greatest novel of the Mexican Revolution, in a brilliant new translation by an award-winning translator The Underdogs is the first great novel about the first great revolution of the twentieth century. Demetrio Macias, a poor, illiterate Indian, must join the rebels to save his family. Courageous and charismatic, he earns a generalship in Pancho Villa’s army, only to become discouraged with the cause after it becomes hopelessly factionalized. At once a spare, moving depiction of the limits of political idealism, an authentic representation of Mexico’s peasant life, and a timeless portrait of revolution, The Underdogs is an iconic novel of the Latin American experience and a powerful novel about the disillusionment of war.

‘Sentimental Education’ has been described both as the first modern novel and as a novel to end all novels. Weaving a poignant love story into his account of the 1848 revolution, Flaubert shows a society in the grip of stereotypes, on every level. There is something farcical in his depiction of characters who aspire to act but are dogged by cliche at every turn. To a greater extent even than Madame Bovary, ‘Sentimental Education’ is an indictment of modern consumerism, contrasting the hollowness of material achievement with the lasting beauty of the ideal. Flaubert’s study of success and failure offers us a terrible sadness in a terrible beauty, yet is one of the world’s great comic masterpieces. AUTHOR: Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) achieved instant success and fame, indeed notoriety, with his first novel, ‘Madam Bovary’, published in 1857. He was prosecuted on the basis that the novel was ‘offensive to public morality and religion’. Although found not guilty, Flaubert earned a lecture from the judge on the dangers of ‘realism’. The book was a huge success, and Flaubert came to be considered one of the great novelists of Western literature.