ABSTRACT

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary ‘I don’t much care for coincidences. There’s something spooky about them: you sense momentarily what it must be like to live in an ordered, God-run universe, with Himself looking over your shoulder and helpfully dropping coarse hints about a cosmic plan. I prefer to feel that things are chaotic, freewheeling, permanently as well as temporarily crazy-to feel the certainty of human ignorance, brutality and folly.’