Here is Gustave Flaubert's historical/exotic/adventure novel Salambo: The Great Novel of Ancient Carthage by the Author of Madame Bovary, translated from the French by E. Powys Mather. I'm beginning to read this novel again, but this time I'm enjoying pretty much every page. I am reading as if for teaching, and so I have a pencil in my hand and I'm particularly tuned in to the strategies and nuances at work, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence. I'm finding myself thrilled by this novel that I've underestimated for so long.
I'd read Flaubert's Madame Bovary when I was pursuing the greatest hits of 19th-century European literature, but when I first turned to Salambo in my undergraduate days, I was skeptical and unappreciative. How could any Great Novelist write a good adventure tale? Most of the canonical good adventure novelists like Jack London or even Ernest Hemingway were treated by many of the faculty of my alma mater condescendingly. (Seriously, in the early 1980s, when a senior seminar on Hemingway was offered, I heard complaints that he was too journalistic to be treated so respectfully. This was also a group that scoffed at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as too poorly written to qualify as a classic novel. Grrr.)
Or, say, I recalled how much I felt Steinbeck, a favorite of mine in terms of Monterey and California fiction, just seemed to botch the pirate tale in his Cup of Gold, though I have come to appreciate that novel lately. Anyway, for ages I just didn't believe Flaubert could write the novel I wanted to read on Carthage (note that problematic projection), and I haven't been able to get past page 50 or so in the last three times I tried to read the book. (I managed a full reading back in the mid-90s, but I can't recall the main action at all from that reading, so it's as if I am starting anew.)
Here's an action-passage that I'm particularly fond of:
Matho, at his bidding, endeavoured to lever out one of the blocks of stones; but he had no space to move his elbows.
"We shall come back," said Spendius. "Go on in front."
Then they ventured into the conduit.
The water came up to their waists, and soon they were staggering and forced to swim. They barked their limbs against the walls of the narrow duct: the water ran almost to the level of the stones that roofed it in, and these tore their faces. They they were carried along by the current. An atmosphere heavier than that of the tomb weighed down upon their lungs; stretching themselves out as much as possible, with their heads between their arms and their knees pressed close together, they passed like arrows into the darkness, choking, gasping, and almost overcome. Suddenly everything went black before them, and the water redoubled its speed. They fell.
When they came to the surface again, they remained for some minutes floating on their backs, taking delicious drafts of air. Line behind line of wide walls pierced with archways divided the basins. These were all full, and the whole length of the cisterns was one unbroken sheet of water. The air-holes in the cupolas of the roofing filtered pale discs of light upon the water, and the darkness thickened towards the walls, making them seem indefinitely distant. The slightest noise set up a loud echoing.
Spendius and Matho started to swim again and, passing through the arches, crossed several chambers in succession. A chain of smaller basins ran on each side of them. They lost themselves, turned and came back again. At last their feet met something solid. It was the stone ledge which ran alongside the cisterns.
Proceeding very cautiously, they felt along the wall for an outlet; but their feet kept slipping, and they fell back into the deep basins. They had to climb up again, and again fell back. They were terribly weary, and felt as if their limbs had melted in the water as they swam. Their eyes closed, and they felt all the agony of death.
Spendius struck his hand against the bars of a grating. They both shook it, and it gave way; and they found themselves upon some steps. At the top of these there was a closed door of bronze; but with the point of a dagger they lifted the bar which held it on the other side, and suddenly pure open air was about them.
--from Gustave Flaubert's Salambo,
Translated from the French by E. Powys Mather,
A Berkeley Medallion Book,
Berkeley Publishing Corporation: New York,
1955.
