Pages from the Goncourt Journals

Praise

"Not just a vivid, intimate chronicle of a thrilling time, it’s also full of moments of casual, withering brilliance…Geoff Dyer provides a suitably awestruck foreword." —Evening Standard [UK]

“A splendid record of the literary and artistic scene in the France of the time (Jules died in 1870, Edmond in 1896), with wonderful pen-portraits of famous contemporaries. This selection by the late Robert Baldick allows us to enjoy again such things as Edmund’s carefully-observed picture of his friend Flaubert, alone on stage after one of his had flopped.” –Sunday Telegraph [UK]

“The Goncourt brothers were pioneers in the realm of realistic, almost clinical fiction. But Zola, Daudet, Maupassant reaped the fame which the Goncourts considered as their due…They were pioneers also as historians of eighteenth-century society…Mr. Baldick…has written a terse and suggestive introduction for this handsome book.”
–The New York Times

“My favorite literary diaries are French: The Goncourt Journals–gossip about Flaubert, Zola etc. and Paris in the late 19th century.”–Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“It surely ranks as the most entertaining work of literary gossip of the nineteenth century.”–Spectator

“The literary liveliness of the belle époque is exactly caught. Plushy, sleazy-sexy, cocottish, with the pox and the clap always waiting to pounce–yes; but the accompaniment to all this is a passionate and unqualified concern for good writing, and an abundance of power.”–Punch

“It is impossible to summarize the Journal because of its value lies in its multiplicity. Practically everybody of note in France between 1851-1896, from Napoleon to “Gung’l, journalist” makes an appearance in its pages, as do foreigners like Swinburne, Wilde, Strindberg, Whistler, and Korin, a Japanese artist. It is not political: aside from describing the defeat of 1870, the horrors of the Commune, and changes of regime including the establishment of the Third Republic…the Journal is primarily concerned with literary men and their doings…Robert Baldick’s excellent translation…lulls the reader into thinking he is reading the original text.”–Sewanee Review