In One Brief Moment All Eternity

“Does literature even matter in times of great sorrow?” mulls a middle-aged Gustave Flaubert in Elif Shafak’s In One Brief Moment All Eternity. Before finding infamy as Madame Bovary’s author, Flaubert was a bright-eyed boy obsessed with stories, colours and ghosts. One day, after glimpsing a girl through the windows of his father’s hospital, he pleads with the surgeon to cut out his heart – he wants to tie it with a green ribbon and give it to the pretty stranger.

So imagines lauded British writer Shafak in her latest novel, which turns Flaubert into her own literary creation, seen through eyes of the females he idolised, romanticised and eventually immortalised in Emma Bovary.

It’s a reimagining that pulses with characters and colour. Shafak gives voices to 30 female figures who marked the French author’s life: the maid who mothered him as a child amid death and disease; the tightrope walker who captured his imagination; Madame Bovary herself, fuming at her creator under his quill; and personifications of the opium that observed the restless youth visiting its dens in Paris, and the syphilis that plagued him in his middle age.

The novel contains a universe brimming with inner worlds. Through flights of literary imagination and prose that ebbs and swells into torrents of language, Shafak spins tales within tales that span pandemics, wars and revolutions, unearthing wonder in the ordinary moments that make up a life. Each chapter homes in on a coloured object that anchors a memory: the green ribbon of his childhood, a belly dancer’s amethyst shawl from his youthful travels to the Orient, the ebony loaves of bread made from bark and bones during the siege of Paris in his middle age. Alternating between these mementoes and the female recollection of events, Shafak melds Flaubert’s 19th century with life’s minutiae to stitch together short stories, creating a kaleidoscope of hope and despair, love and loss, triumph and failure.