A frightened boy in a Rouen hospital house is told a story by the servant who raises him, about a bird whose feathers are made of light and whose name nobody can quite explain. He spends the next fifty years catching glimpses of it, at the edge of fields, above the Nile, in a Paris courtroom, and nobody else ever sees it. That bird is the load-bearing wall of In One Brief Moment All Eternity by Elif Shafak, and the explanation of what it is arrives on the last two pages, where it does exactly the damage it was designed to do.
The Man Is the Only One Who Does Not Get to Speak
The novel tells Gustave Flaubert’s life in five parts, from the cholera summer of his childhood to a May morning at Croisset in 1880. His chapters are written in a watchful present-tense third person. Every other chapter belongs to a woman, numbered, speaking in the first person, and she talks about him the way people talk about a man who has left the room.
Julie the nursemaid, who arrives at thirteen and leaves in old age. His mother, formidable and grieving and impossible. His sister, dead in childbed at twenty-one. Louise Colet, who gets one page to state a claim on Emma Bovary and does not waste it. George Sand, whose chapter is the warmest in the book and quietly the wisest, arguing that romantic love burns out but a friendship of the mind will hold. Princess Mathilde. A prosecutor’s wife with a locked chest of her own. A Romani herbalist named Azucena who reads omens in the way birds go quiet.
Some of the narrators in In One Brief Moment All Eternity by Elif Shafak are not people at all. A city speaks. A drug speaks. A disease speaks, in a voice of appalling professional pride. A camel who spends her life in a circus and her last week in a besieged Paris zoo describes both, and readers will remember that chapter long after they have forgotten the plot of Salammbô.
The cumulative effect is a reversal that sneaks up on the reader. The novelist celebrated for insisting he was Madame Bovary is here observed, appraised, forgiven and occasionally convicted by everyone he thought he was observing. He is the object. They are the subjects. Nobody in the book says this out loud until very late, which is the right decision, and then somebody does say it out loud, which is not.
Colour Does the Work of Chapter Titles
Every Flaubert chapter is named for a colour attached to an object: a yellow butterfly, a verdigris teapot, an amaranth haze, an ecru feather duster, a pearl-white coffin. It sounds like a decorative tic and turns out to be a compression device. The duster is a woman’s entire working life. The coffin is a mother’s sixty-year secret. Shafak lets the object carry the emotional weight of a scene she then declines to over-explain, and in a novel this crowded, that restraint is what keeps it readable.
The prose of In One Brief Moment All Eternity by Elif Shafak is warm and sensory rather than cold and Flaubertian, which is a deliberate contrast rather than a failure of nerve. Rouen is ether, river silt and wet stone. Esna is rose otto, dust and river light. When Shafak wants a sentence to imitate her subject she can, and the Istanbul chapter, one continuous accelerating run of clauses, is the show-off passage of the book.
In One Brief Moment All Eternity by Elif Shafak Is Built on an Illness
Flaubert’s epilepsy is not background colour here. Every sighting of the bird is fastened to a seizure, and the novel eventually names the modern diagnosis that researchers now think may explain his sudden death: sudden unexpected death in epilepsy, a term that did not exist for another century. It is a bold move, threading a contemporary medical finding into a nineteenth-century life, and it works because Shafak has spent four hundred pages earning it.
The mercury treatments for syphilis run alongside, tremor by tremor and tooth by tooth. So does the arsenic, which turns up in a bedroom wallpaper, in a provincial courtroom, in a translator’s chemist bottle and in the most famous death scene in French fiction. Chemistry is the through-line of In One Brief Moment All Eternity by Elif Shafak, and it is the reason the book never feels like a costume drama.
Where the Chorus Thins
- Filler narrators. Thirty is a number the ending requires, not a number the material supports. Four or five of the testimonies are three pages of historical exposition wearing a first-person coat.
- The fourth part sags. The Franco-Prussian war, the siege and the Commune take up a great deal of room, and much of it is delivered in essayistic paragraphs about political extremism that leave the novel and do not hurry back.
- The moral gets spoken. A late scene has a critic publish an attack asking why this novelist’s women never speak, which hands the reader a key to a door already open.
- Aphorism inflation. Shafak has always written in wisdom-literature cadences. Here they cluster, and the good ones lose force standing next to the merely nice ones.
None of that is fatal, and one chapter in particular buys back the whole sag: a baker shot during the last week of the Commune, narrating from the wrong side of death, following Flaubert through a cemetery and touching his shoulder while he fails to notice. It is the finest thing Shafak has written.
If You Finish This and Need Something Else
Readers who take to In One Brief Moment All Eternity by Elif Shafak tend to want more of one specific thing: a famous life told from the cheap seats. There Are Rivers in the Sky is the obvious next step, braiding three lives across three millennia with the same structural confidence and rather less cast to manage. Readers drawn to the Ottoman and Turkish thread should try The Renovation by Kenan Orhan, which is funnier and just as interested in what a state does to a private life. Beyond our shelves, Colm Toibin’s The Master is the other great modern novel about a canonical writer observed at close range and never quite explained, and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea remains the founding text for the thing this book is doing, handing a silenced woman from a famous novel the authority to answer back. For the primary source, the English Madame Bovary most readers have encountered was translated by Eleanor Marx, who gets a chapter here of her own.
Where In One Brief Moment All Eternity by Elif Shafak Leaves You
The last movement gathers every narrator, human and otherwise, into one house and one garden, and then explains the arithmetic of the bird. It is a closing sequence of genuine beauty, and it retroactively justifies choices that looked indulgent two hundred pages earlier. What lingers afterwards is not Flaubert at all. It is Julie, who left a feather duster on the floor, and the baker in the cemetery, still asking a man who cannot hear her whether he remembers her shop.
