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Flaubert in egypt6/5/2023 Flaubert was apparently bored by du Camp’s painstaking photographic work in the temples and tombs, and his descriptions tend less towards apprehending the ruins of antiquity than the life of the people in the streets. Street rapes by locals are dispassionatley reported, brief homosexual encounters in steam rooms are casually averred, while his brothel experiences are meticulously set down, particularly his fondness for the courtesan Kuchuk Hanem, whom he visits multiple times.Īs sleazy as this sounds, akin to the wanderings of a Burroughsian sex tourist (see review of The Soft Machine), it could perhaps be viewed as part of a wider literary sensibility. These last two demonstrate the largely lubricious tone of proceedings. The result is a vivid, sensuous account of a travel experience, as Flaubert pays attention to details that lesser writers would cast aside as insignificant: a handshake between a man on a camel and a man on the ground a monkey pleasuring a donkey in the street a boy offering his mother for five paras and wishing him a ‘long prick’.
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