In One Brief Moment All Eternity by Elif Shafak: Wonder and intrigue on every page

In One Brief Moment All Eternity

Author: Elif Shafak

ISBN-13: 978-0241745465

Publisher: Viking

Guideline Price: £20; 608pp

Writing has been described as an act of daring. For a writer to present a 600-page novel takes some neck. My pyjamaed eight-year-old hauled Elif Shafak’s In One Brief Moment All Eternity into her lap and read excitedly: “When he wakes up this morning, only two thoughts cross his mind: that he is going to kill the woman he loves, and that he is going to do it today.”

The opening line is dazzling. Wonder and intrigue continue on every page of Shafak’s semifictional chronicle of French author Gustave Flaubert’s life and writings. The work has two crowning glories – the inventive narrative architecture and the luxurious prose.

Flaubert’s dark imagination and his fascination with those most marginalised are dissected through the fictionalised perspectives of people, characters, places and objects that shaped his life and his stories. Each new point of view, including The Corpse, The Acrobat, The Green Ribbon and Syphilis allows anticipation to canter throughout. The prose is lush with sensory detail, a tense air described as “thick as dough”.

Flaubert is an odd little boy, born in Rouen in 1821. His family lives on the grounds of the hospital of which his father is chief surgeon, providing a wonderful hunting ground for the child’s story-hungry mind. Sent to study law in Paris and secretly exploring his talents as a writer, Flaubert enters a colourful and hedonistic period of his life, adventuring through the backstreets of cities as far as Istanbul.

Like the horse in Flaubert’s most famous carriage scene in Madame Bovary, Shafak’s writing begins to gallop as middle age takes hold of Flaubert and the Franco-Prussian War takes hold of France. An indelible portrait of the people of Paris is captured in a staggering account of desperation that assuages all fears for the reader of a saggy middle in this epic.

For readers of Flaubert’s works or biographies, the novel may be even more indulgent. Regardless of familiarity with the man or his writings, Shafak’s reimagining of the author’s creative inspirations is fascinating. In One Brief Moment All Eternity is a kaleidoscope of observations of a great artistic intellect, of a tumultuous 19th-century France, and of the torturous life that every lover of literature knows all too well.

Céire Sadlier is a writer and a freelance reviewer