رواية عظيمة، ملحمة تاريخية، حروب وقتل وصراع على السلطة، جيوش وشعوب ومرتزقة وملوك، عبادة وطقوس وكهنة والهة، وحب غريب... اتذكر مرور اسم الرواية في روايات اخرى علي، وكذلك ذكر فلوبير، هذا الانسان غريب الاطوار والانعزالي، الذي آمن بأن الحياة المثلى هي في العزلة والابتعاد عن الصخب، حتى الحب والارتباط ضحى بهما من اجل تصوفه، كره البشر ومات وحيدا، عشق الشرق وتاريخه العريق، سافر اليه وربما ترك روحه هناك، اذ ان رواية مثل سالامبو تبين كيف كان ولهه بهذا الجزء من العالم.
على الرغم من صعوبتها، كثرة الأحداث، والكثير من القسوة والدماء، والاحتياج الى التركيز حتى لا ينفصل القارئ عن سلسلة الاحداث والشخصيات، الا انها فعلا ملحمة تاريخية مهمة، تستحق الانضمام الى خانة الملاحم التاريخية مثل كلكامش والرامايانا...

SALAMMBO! (spoilers)

It’s pretty good! Give it a read!

What else can I say about it?

An historical novel set in the Mercenary War Carthage fought after the first Punic war. Essentially, Carthage refuses to pay its mercenary soldiers, things spiral out of control, then they get worse, then they get really worse. The main axis of the book is built around the love/hate relationship between Matho, the leader of the mercenaries and Salammbo, daughter of Hamlicar Barca, (who is the father of Hannibal of Elephant fame). Story has slaves, war, battles, schemes, pride, jealousy, strange gods, savagery, massive orientalism and many many elephants were very much harmed in the creation of this story not approved by the animal care people at all.

This is the only book by Flaubert I have read and seems to be very much _not typical_ for his ouvre. The rest are 19th Century French realism about relationships and stuff. I have done a series of social media posts about the relationship of literary and 'secret genre' writers and will try to pull those together in a later post.






>> WHAT ABOUT THE WRITING?

It is a steaming pile of details! Researched, imagined, confabulated. A story of things! Very like some balladic structure stories, lists of lists of lists, inflated and intensified by the density of the novel.

Really the book drips gems and oozes blood. If tip it over, the shining feather of a sacred hummingbird wound with old threat comes out clutched in the head of a skinned mouse which has been stuffed with mhyrr. The book is nearly smoking, its fuming, its hot in there and the bloodstench, reek of burning cities, unguents, spices, perfumes, wafts of burning bezoars drawn from the gullets of a whale, is so heavy you feel drugged, which you probably actually are.

Vividness! Everything is so particular. No vague moments, general experiences or non-specific objects. Only immediate, vivid, burning slices of a highly imagined reality.

The Multiplication of Hieraticism! Flaubert is very into his characters being Heiratic, posing, performing, existing like statues or symbols, embodying roles, which they do both diegetically in the imagined world but also generally like that in the story, Matho IS the Noble Savage Barbarian Mercinary, Spendius IS the crafty, clever cowardly greek, Narr' Havas IS the mysterious Numidian Horse Lord, Slammbo IS the moon-worshipping Pirestess/Princes object of desire and feminine principal. Hanno, the preferred leader of Carthages corrupt old man class IS.. well look at this Druillet illustration from his si-fi adaptation;



THE EMOTIONS

Characters have strong singular emotions. Oddly, the source of the strife, or its main organiser, seems to be the existence between Matho and Salammbo of something like love, or at least an emotion or range of emotions neither of them can describe, understand or adapt to, and which show themselves in these vast towers of gilded obsession.

They desire each other, exert power over each other, submit or gloat. Really almost no-one has what we would consider a normal conversation in this world. One either holds the edge of a bronze sword to another’s neck and LAUGHS while sweat and perfume is massaged into your scalp by slaves, or rolls and capers in the dust, naked and scarred, begging to kiss another’s feet.

Its fucking nuts. When the elders of Carthage finally get Hamlicar, their best general, back to save them from their own dumb fucking screwups, in the weird masonic cult meeting that passes for their Central Command Conference, where no-one is meant to be armed, they lose their shit with him and pull out daggers to kill him, then he pulls out two(!) swords and leaps onto an altar to defy them. Then everyone realises that since everyone broke the sword rule they just agree not to speak about it. This is like if MacArthur came back from Korea and got into an armed mexican standoff with Truman in the White House, which McArthur would probably have done if he could but he was a bit like a Salammbo character anyway.

Luckily(?) everyone in the story gets to occupy each of those positions at least once.

HATE! Nearly everyone in Salammbo seems to low-key hate nearly everyone else;
Carthaginians and Mercenaries, Matho and Salammbo, the Carthage elders and Hamlicar, Carthage and its surrounding territories, Punic Carthaginians and native Carthaginians, Moloch and Tanit, camels and elephants...

LOVE! There are only a few examples of what we would call love, or even affection; Matho and Salammbos strangulated mutual desire, Hamlicar loves Hannibal, his son but Flaubert is careful to say, he is an extension of himself into the future. The patricians of carthage seem to love their children at least enough for some of them to be reluctant to sacrifice them to Moloch. The biggest scene of love is towards the end where many of the mercenaries have been trapped and Hamlicar pulls a Joker and tells them if they kill each other in hand to hand he will forgive and employ the survivors
here we get this;

"The community of their lives had brought about profound friendship amongst these men. The camp, with most, took the place of their country; living without a family they transferred the needful tenderness to a companion, and they would fall asleep in the starlight side by side under the same cloak. And then in their perpetual wandering through all sorts of countries, murders and adventures, they had contracted affections, one for the other, in which the stronger protected the younger in the midst of battles, helped him to across precipices, sponges the sweat of fevers from his brow, and stole food for him, and the weaker, a child perhaps, who had been picked up on the roadside, and had then become a Mercenary, repaid this devotion by a thousand kindnesses.

They exchanged their necklaces and earrings, presents which they had made to one another in former days, after great peril, or in hours of intoxication. All asked to die, and none would strike,. A young fellow might be seen here and there saying to another whose beard was grey: "No! no! you are more robust! you will avenge us, kill me!" and the man would reply: "I have fewer years to live! Strike to the heart, and think no more about it!" Brothers gazed on one another with clasped hands, and friend bade friend eternal farewells, standing and weeping upon his shoulder."




>> THE WORLD

Gigantic! Through reach, specificity and most of all through its teeming diversity of wildly different cultures all massed and thronging together. Though to us, we could fly across every land described in a few hours, and even drive across the main areas in a day or two, to those within it, Carthage is like a strange moon orbiting through strange stars; the entirety of the Mediterranean world, from the strange misty gloom forests of the Celts and Germans to the north, the Numidian horsemen, Greeks, Romans, the strange impossible peoples of Africa beyond the desert. First the Nomads;

"They were nor Libyans from the neighbourhood of Carthage, who had long composed the third army, but nomads from the tableland of Barca, bandits from Cape Phiscus and the promontory of Dernah, from Phazzana and Marmaricia. They had crossed the desert, drinking at the brackish wells walled with camels bone, the Zuaeces, with their covering of ostrich eathers, had come on quadringa, the Garamantians, masked with black veils, rode on their painted mares; others were mounted on asses, onagers, zebra, and buffaloes; while some dragged after them the roofs of their sloop-shaped huts together with their families and idols. There were Ammonians with limbs wrinkled by the hot water of the springs, Ataranians, who curse the sun; Troglodytes, who bury their dead with laughter beneath branches of trees, and the hideous Auseans, who eat grass-hoppers; the Achyrmmachidae who eat lice, and the vermillion-painted Gysantians, who eat apes."

Then;

"First were seen running up all the hunters from Malethut-Baal and Garaphos, clad in lions skins, and with the staves of their pikes driving small lean horses with long manes; then marched the Gaetulians in cuirasses of serpents skin; then the Pharusians, wearing lofty crowns made of wax and resin; and the Caunians, Macarians, and Tillabarians, each holding two javelins and a round shield of hippopotamus leather."

We can go further! (and get waaay more racially sketchy);

"But when the Libyans had moved away, the multitude of the Negroes appeared like a cloud on a level with te ground, in the place which the others hd occupied. They were there from the White Harousch, the Black Harousch, the desert of Augila, and even from the great country of Agazymba, which is four months journey south of the Garamantians, and from regions further still! IN spite of their red wooden jewels, the filth of their black skin made them look like mulberries that had been long rolling in the dust. They had bark-thread drawers, dried-gras tunics, fallow deer-muzzels on their heads; they shook rods furnished with rings, and brandished cows tails at the end of sticks, after the fashion of standards, howling the while like wolves."

Ok we have gone through 19thC orientalism, can we go into near-fantasy? Like a Conan story?

"Then behind the Numidians, Marusians, and Gaetulians pressed the yellowish men, who are spread through the cedar forests beyond Taggir. They had cat-ski quivers flapping against their shoulders, and they led in leashes enormous dogs, which were as high as asses and did not bark."

How about EVEN FURTHER into full Realms of Chaos Warhammer?

"Finally, as though Africa had not been sufficiently emptied, and it had been necessary to seek further fury in the very dregs of the races, men might be seen behind th rest, with beast-like profiles and grinning with idiotic laughter - wretches ravaged by hideous diseases, deformed pigmies, mulattoes of doubtful sex, albinos whose red eyes blinked in the sun; stammering out unintelligible sounds, they put a finger in their mouths to show that they were hungry."

A world in the lap of the gods - divine power everywhere! Layered secret-trap temples hiding incredible histories, sacred treasures. Huge Brazen Gods that fucking shovel children into their burning mouths with articulated fucking arms.

Were you wondering where shit like this first came from?

https://youtu.be/MbEtIWMbz8w?t=244

From here! From Salammbo!

TREASURE - does treasure only exist as a vector of our desire? It would seem so, Hamlicar has his multiply-hidden treasure vault (the extra grain isn’t there, its hidden under the flagstones of his house) with the fake pit, the secret entrance, and then the even more secret entrance with the super-secret built in code so complex it is secretly worked into the pattern tattooed on his arms!

"The walls were covered wth scales of brass; and in the centre, on a granite pedestal, stood the statue of one of the Kabiri called Aletes, the discoverer of the mines in Celtiberia. On the ground, at its base, and arranged in the form of a cross, were large gold shields and monster close-necked silver vases of extravagant shape and unfitted for use; it was customary to cast quantities of metal in this way, so that dilapidation and even removal should be almost impossible.

With his torch he lit a miner's lamp which was fastened to the idols cap, and green, yellow, blue, violent, wine-coloured and blood-coloured fires suddenly illuminated the hall. It was filled with gems which were either in gold calabashes fastened like sconces upon sheets of brass, or were ranged in native masses at the foot of the wall. There were callaides shot away from the mountains with slings, carbuncles formed by the urine of the lynx, glossopetrae which had fallen from the moon, tyanos, diamonds, sandastra, beryls, with the three kinds of rubies, the four kinds of sapphires, and the twelve kinds of emeralds. They gleamed like splashes of milk, blue icicles, and silver dust, and shed their light in sheets, rays, and stars. Ceraunia, engendered by the thunder, sparkles by the side of chalcedonies, which are a cure for poison. There were topazes from Mount Zabarca to evert terrors, opals from Bactria to prevent abortions, and horns of Ammon, which are placed under the bead to induce dreams.

The fires from the stones and the flames from the lamp were mirrored in the great golden shields. Hamlicar stood smiling with folded arms, and was less delighted by the sight of the riches than by the consciousness of their possession. They were inaccessible, exhaustless, infinite. His ancestors sleeping beneath his feet transmitted something of their eternity to his heart. He felt very near to the subterranean deities. It was as the joy o one of the Kabirir; and the great luminous rays striking upon his face looked like the extremity of an invisible net linking him across the abysses with the centre of the world.

A thought came which made him shudder, and placing himself behind the idol he walked straight up to the wall. Then among the tattooings on his arm he scrutinised a horizontal line with two other perpendicular ones which in Channatish figures expressed the number thirteen. Then he counted as far as the thirteenth of the brass plates and again raised his ample sleeve; and with his right hand stretched out he read other more complicated lines on his arm, at the same time moving his fingers daintily about like one playing on a lyre. At last he struck seven blows with his thumb, and an entire section of the wall turned about in a single block.

It served to conceal a sort of cellar containing mysterious things which had no name and were of incalculable value. Hamlicar went down the three steps, took up a llama's skin which was floating on a black liquid in a silver vat, and then re-ascended."



ITS D&D AS FUCK

TREASURE, especially Hamlicars Vaults and Matho and Spendius' break in of the Temple of Tanith

MURDER-HOBOISM, unitary desires, consuming ambition, wild fluctuations in state power, huge diversity of peoples and the frontier of an undiscovered ungoverned (by the people in this story at least) world, mean law is power and power is law, and that means promises, schemes, negotiations, very occasional mercy and relentless betrayal of everyone by everyone.

GODS AND MAGIC!! - Is any of it real? Probably not! But everyone in the story believes it! Including you if you are there! Look out for those curses, inauspicious hours, sacred animals, angry priests, mass hysteria, dark hours, divine promises, informative dreams and so on. Also all the gods have treasure even if its just food, also the priests are stealing the food

ANIMALS, FIGHTING, HIRED KILLERS! SO MAN ELEPHANTS DIE HORRIBLY!

Salammbo e mai degrabă un tablou, decât o carte. Fiica lui Hamilcar Barcas e doar pretextul, pentru că adevărata eroină a cărții este Cartagina epocii părintelui lui Hannibal, cel mai obstinat dușman al Romei, omul care a fost cel mai aproape să-i aducă pieirea. Cu stil, Flaubert ne conduce în interiorul cetății-stat, prin cartiere aglomerate și palate bogate, la mesele sufeților și aristocraților, în templele lui Baal sau la chefurile mercenarilor. Excelentă descriere geografică și antropologică a Africii mediteraneene, a relațiilor politice dintre oraș, ca centru fortificat de putere, și spațiul populat de triburile locului. O carte despre un timp al mercenarilor de toate neamurile, în care grecii, galii și italicii sunt simbriași ai fenicienilor, iar numidienii sunt vasali instabili. O vreme a cruzimii și sclaviei, a revoltelor și a jertfelor. Evenimentul istoric care umple narațiunea este războiul mercenarilor împotriva Cartaginei, din secolul III î.e.n., izbucnit după primul război punic. Dacă vreți să vă închipuiți cum ar fi putut arăta Spendius și Matho, Hamilcar și NarrHavas sau sora nenumită a lui Hannibal, citiți cartea lui Flaubert. Atenție, a nu se confunda cu un volum istoriografic.

https://constantinvasilescu.wordpress...

Look, the language was, unsurprisingly, strong. But was this a story which needed to be told? Is this something that should have withstood the test of time? No. the first two thirds is slow and formulaic. The last third is nauseating, and I am a pretty jaded person.

Recommended for: people who appreciate the movie Saw.

stylistisch prachtig, verhaal kon misschien wat beter

da ne poveruješ da je ovo napisao flober. pre bih rekla dzordz martin , a sad sam ubeđena da su tvorci igre prestola čitali ovaj roman. meni bi se više dopao da su, na uštrb opisa bitaka, razrađeni likovi salambe i mata, pa da, ko u tolstojevom romanu, imamo pola rata, a pola romana zauzmu osećanja ovo dvoje. mada, ipak, flober uspeva da, kroz par rečenica, dočara silinu i boju te ljubavi, te tako dodaje toplinu ovoj hladnoj i jezivoj, skoro horor, priči

کتابی به منظور متعجب کردن خواننده؛ به خصوص اگر از همین نویسنده، اول مادام بوواری را خوانده باشد!
در واقع نامگذاری کتاب به نام تنها دختر داستان کمی بازارگرمی است چون او هم مانند بقیه شخصیتها نقش کوچکی در وقایع دارد و قهرمان اصلیْ کارتاژ است. شهری که پایه‌های تمدن آن را کشاورزی، دریانوردی، برده‌داری و جنگ تشکیل می‌داد با آداب رسومی که انسان امروزی را متحیر می‌کند. نمی‌دانم ادعاهای کتاب تا چه حد به حقیقت نزدیک است و فلوبر تا چه اندازه درباره کارتاژ تحقیق کرد اما داستان خواندنی است و ترجمه فاخر سمیعی گیلانی هم برازنده حال و هوای کتاب.

ძალიან საინტერესო ნაწარმოებია,ბევრი სილამაზით,ემოციითა და გრძნობით.
„მადამ ბოვარით“ აღფრთივანებული ვერ დავრჩი,შემდეგ გუსტავისადმი დამოკიდებულება “ფლობერის თუთიყუშმა“ შემიცვალა ,ჰოდა, “სალამბომ“ კიდევ უფრო განმიმტკიცა პატივისცემა და სიყვარული ამ კაცისადმი ^^

This book is bananas. I've never read Madame Bovary, and probably never will (authorial contempt for his characters is always a kiss of death for me), and I only had a vague second-hand impression of Flaubert as the austere, controlled, super-precise artist, who spent a week writing a sentence, a day pondering it and adding a comma, then another day pondering it and taking the comma out again, and wrote with severe judgment about the banalities of boring people; an arch-realist and classicist. None of this prepared me for the wild, operatic, extravagantly oversaturated Orientalist excess of this book, which is not about the tedious bourgeois but about the city of Carthage between the Punic Wars, and an unpaid mercenary army who attacks it.

One needs a certain taste to like this book; if you are not fond of piles of bewildering details, cascades of exotic and uncommon words, precise names of plants and gems and dyes and perfumes, you will not like this book. A couple of examples. Here is our hero (for some value of "hero") Matho, suffering from love-melancholy:

He consulted all the soothsayers in the army one after the other -- those who watch the trails of serpents, those who read the stars, and those who breathe upon the ashes of the dead. He swallowed galbanum, seseli, and viper's venom which freezes the heart; negro women, singing barbarous words in the moonlight, pricked the skin of his forehead with golden stylets; he loaded himself with necklaces and charms; he evoked in turn Baal-Khamoun, Moloch, the seven Kabiri, Tanith, and the Venus of the Greeks. He engraved a name upon a copper plate, and buried it in the sand at the threshold of his tent.

Here is Schahabarim, eunuch priest of Tanith and caretaker of "heroine" Salammbo:

No one in Carthage was so learned as he. In his youth he had studied at the College of the Mogbeds, at Borsippa, near Babylon; had then visited Samothrace, Pessinus, Ephesus, Thessaly, Judea, and the temples of the Nabathei, which are lost in the sands; and had travelled on foot along the banks of the Nile from the cataracts to the sea. Shaking torches with veil-covered face he had cast a black cock upon a fire of sandarach before the breast of the Sphinx, the Father of Terror. He had descended into the caverns of Proserpine; he had seen the five hundred pillars of the labyrinth of Lemnos revolve, and the candelabrum of Tarentum, which bore as many sconces on its shaft as there are days in the year, shine in its splendor.

For many this is intolerable; for me it is pure delight. These rythmic recitals of unfamiliar place-names and materials to create a sort of evocative trance state reflect a way of writing that goes back to Homer and Aeschylus. Nowadays it more suggests a somewhat unfashionable type of science fiction, which is definitely one thing I thought of while I read. There are innumerable examples, describing fabulous costume, luxurious interiors, all the riches of Hamilcar (the Carthaginian general, father of Hannibal, who fought in the First Punic War, and is a major character of the book).

But Flaubert's thirst for pure sensation does not end at the pleasant and luxurious; like a rigorous painter who uses the same finish for the background that she uses for the face in a portrait, Flaubert's extravagant powers of description are turned alike on the filthy, disgusting, and horrifying. If he can invent "a small ivory bed covered with lynx skins, and cushions made of the feathers of a parrot, a fatidical animal consecrated to the gods, [with] four long perfuming-pans filled with nard, incense, cinnamomum, and myrrh", he can equally invent a hideous leper: "Ulcers covered the nameless mass; the fat on his legs hid the nails on his feet; from his fingers there hung what looked like greenish strips; and the tears streaming through the tubercules on his cheeks gave to his face an expression of frightful sadness, for they seemed to take up more room than on another human face." Every variety of suffering, cruelty, torture, pain, and death is detailed with verbose relish, especially in two punishing sequences where, first, the Mercenaries besiege Carthage, and then when Hamilcar has turned the tables and trapped the Mercenaries in a narrow inescapable mountain pass. Both trapped groups suffer terrifying, hopeless agonies of hunger and thirst, and the first is capped off with what, if you know anything about Carthaginian religion, you know must be the climax to this book; which bloody rite is comparatively understated and all the more horrifying for that. It's an impressive performance, a sort of defiant obstinacy, as though to prove that for Flaubert, if not for any other aesthete, the hideous and the beautiful, the disgusting and the lovely, are equally valuable, because equally extreme, pure sensory experience.

But to me the most impressive thing is, unlike any other historical fiction I've read, Flaubert truly does not present modern people in fancy dress. I can't say, of course, whether his characters are authentically antique, but they certainly are not modern. The closest, perhaps, is Spendius, the Greek slave who leads the Mercenaries, and perhaps Schahabarim, the frustrated eunuch, but even these are not people who think like you and me. In general it is the heroes of historical fiction who are the most anachronistic, and this is always vaguely annoying. I remember reading The Alienist on the strength of a review that said the characters were allowed to be pre-modern, and use discredited science and forensics: nonsense. The main character is completely disdainful of these techniques, and proven right when they don't work. Even a writer as rigorous as Eco, in The Name of the Rose, has to play off his progressive, tolerant, empirical, thoroughly modern protagonist with a note in the afterword about how people complain about him, but actually, all the things people think are modern are really historically accurate. You don't fool me, Umberto; maybe you can find justifications here and there for each little bit of Brother William's outlook in writings of the time, but the whole is clearly more modern than the parts, and anyway you cooked him up first and justified him later. Salammbo is a different kind of book; there's no 'good guys' to be the modern ones anyhow, and Flaubert is determined to make their ancient psychology alien to us. As he says in his defense of the book, "The human heart is not the same everywhere, whatever M. Levallois has to say." Speaking of science fiction, even the fashionable kind rarely achieves a believable mind as different from our own as this book.

The downside of this, however, is that it is difficult to feel sympathy for the characters. Although I am fond of impassive, impersonal, hieratic art, I can grant this is probably true. It doesn't, honestly, matter to me--and I felt enough sympathy for the obsessed, irrational love-at-first-sight of Matho, personally. More difficult is the tedium of the battles: Flaubert's omniscient view, like Gibbon, watching from a satellite somewhere, can't capture any real excitement, and anyway none of the fighting really makes sense. The two sides are constantly utterly defeating the other, but when the few meager survivors band together again they are exactly as strong as they had been and crush the other side at the next battle; over and over again. It's boring, and endless. That is the only real failing of the book to me, but it's a big one, as the whole thing is a big war story.

They say Flaubert helped start literary realism; Zola, coming hot on his heels, certainly seems to me to be influenced -- in Nana there is a similar extravagancy of decadent details piled on details. But if so I think it goes to show that realism has always been hysterical; and Huysmans, in Against Nature, was not breaking with the tradition but following it. Salammbo is a bizarre, astonishing tour de force which I can tell will be a kind of mysterious touchstone for me for a long time.

ვისიამოვნე. ბოვარს ათასჯერ მირჩევნია.
დახვეწილი, დამუშავებული, რაფინირებული, ლამაზი - ზოგჯერ ასეთი ლიტერატურაც მოენატრება კაცს.

Having read Madame Bovary, I stumbled across this oddity in Flaubert's work. Historical fiction about ancient Carthage with Hamilkar's fictional daughter Salammbo as heroine. The blurb promised lots of gore, gratuitous violence, raging battles and a love story. This combination of a popular plot-driven genre with Flaubert's writing skill could be great. I hoped for another The Long Ships - or even better.

The story: The First Punic War has ended. Carthage is defeated, its army consisting mostly of mercenaries has to leave Sicily and return to Africa. But nobody knows what to do with them, how to pay them, how to get rid of them now that they are not needed anymore. They are sent away, they are given small change. They rebell. What ensues is known as the Punic Mercenary War. In hindsight, this war is most comparable to the Thirty-Years War. A drawn-out attritional war with heavy losses on all sides, civilians severly suffering and no real winners in the end.

The heydays of Carthage are in the past. It's a decadent society with a corrupt caste of leaders exploiting their slaves. Various cults dominate social life and demand brutal levies. The loss of the Punic War has to be attributed to a lack of support by the government for Hamilkar and his army due to egoistic motives. The same will be true for the ensuing Mercenary War. Carthage is on the verge of losing its hegemonial power in Northern Africa. Close-by punic cities like Utica change loyalty and support the mercenaries. The same goes for the inhabitants of the circumjacent regions, mostly peasants supporting Carthage with their produce and suffering under high taxes.

The war is led with great brutality. Opponents are put to the torture, captives get mutilated, killing slowly is common. The tides of war ebb and flow. Until the very end it's difficult to gauge the outcome. Finally, the support of the former enemy Rome decides in favor of Carthage.

Flaubert could have made great use of this background to populate it with memorable characters experiencing an extraordinary time. Unfortunately, there's no character development to speak of. Salammbo is deeply caught in a female role model of the weak loving wife more akin to the 19th century than sensuous ancient Carthage. The mercenary leaders are drawn one-dimensionally: heroic Matho and scheming Spendius. Instead of developing his characters, Flaubert gets lost in detailing out the battles, the architecture of Carthage, cultic acts and hundreds of other small facets in an effort to paint a huge detailed panorama of ancient Carthage.

Salammbo is a failure. It's as entertaining as a dry scientific work while at the same time the fictional characters and inaccurate historical depictions bereave it of credibility. Flaubert himself admitted his problems in striking this balance. If it weren't for Flaubert, this book would have been rightfully forgotten.

If you want to read a good book settled in Carthage, read Gone Girl. Just shift continents.

Un Flaubert insolito quello di Salambò, romanzo epico, che narra la guerra tra i cartaginesi, guidati da Amilcare Barca e i barbari (mercenari ribelli provenienti da varie parti del mondo conosciuto di allora) capeggiati dal libico Matho. Flaubert ci conduce nel vivo della battaglia con un susseguirsi di vivide scene truculente, in cui par di sentire l’odore del sangue, par di vederlo scorrere ovunque. Sullo sfondo di tanta brutalità, la storia dell'amore impossibile tra la bellissima Salambò, figlia di Amilcare Barca, e Matho, il capo dei ribelli barbari. Flaubert con questo romanzo non si limita ad una ricostruzione storica, ma dà corpo alla crudeltà umana, ce la mostra viva, presente.
Mi è piaciuto tantissimo.