This is great humor, and the accepted ideas it mocks are actually remarkably similar to the accepted ideas of our own time. Flaubert has a way of stating these "facts" that holds them up to the light of his brilliant ridicule. Because a dictionary can contain pretty much anything, Flaubert uses this as a platform to discuss views on art, politics, philosophy, food, animals, and just about everything else. Don't expect, however, to read this and just take its opposite in order to understand Flaubert's mind -- sometimes there is double irony here, and the author is himself ambivalent about the proper "definitions" of the words he lists.

Overall, this is a genuinely funny read, and a useful insight into the petty bourgeois society (similar to our own) Flaubert loved to mock.

Flaubert's satirical reference work, the Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues, reveals in a marvellously condensed form the writer's attitude toward the French bourgeois society in which he was brought up. It is a sort of guidebook to19th-century crassness, triteness, pomposity, and irrationalism decked out to look like reason. Clearly Flaubert regarded his own social class with a mixture of detestation, boredom, and intense fascination. He found both comic and tragic possibilities in this cultural stratum, which he mined relentlessly for the realistic details of his novels Madame Bovary, L'éducation sentimentale, and Bouvard et Pécuchet.

In the early 1850s (while at work on Madame Bovary) Flaubert referred in several letters to his "sottisier," a compendium of trite opinions, of the ideas that "ferment in the brains of the brainless." Flaubert never published his dictionary, although in a letter to his mistress, Louise Colet, he hinted that he intended to do so eventually. Topical dictionaries and digests of knowledge were popular in France, especially among the upwardly mobile, who may have fancied that posession of snippets of miscellaneous information conferred a patina of erudition, and made one's dinner-party conversation more sparkling. Flaubert must have enjoyed parodying the entire concept of the "authoritative" reference work; his private compendium was arranged in alphabetical order, with ludicrous cross-references, secondary definitions (which generally contradict the first one), and a tone of pompous omniscience.

The Dictionary's stock of platitudes served Flaubert as a sourcebook for the opinions of many characters in the novels Madame Bovary, L'éducation sentimentale, and Bouvard et Pécuchet. This work, as well as being enjoyable and witty reading for its own sake, is an indispensable artist's eye view of mid-nineteenth century bourgeois mores, and also provides some insight into the paradox the author struggled with in his novels: how to create pure art out of pure vulgarity.

Bouvard and Pécuchet are a pair of copiers that meet each other by chance and soon become friends. One day, they receive an unexpected inheritance which allows them to finally pursue their dream: to write a huge book about every subject in the world; chemistry, biology, agriculture, politics, gymnastics and so on. They also want to discover the mysteries of love, magic, religion and education. Obviously this ambitious project ends as a disaster and Bouvard and Pecuchet decide to go back to the copying business and forget all about their unrealizable great project.

The book unfolds with equal aplomb in the subjects' time and our own: time out of hand -- caused by war, personal trauma, and the persistent anxiety over fears of terrorism -- can be regained through an understanding of Flowers of Evil and Madame Bovary. You may not believe that nineteenth-century texts can hold the key, but they just may. Marder's book, written before 9/11 but with the event seemingly in mind at each turn, begins the work.