hat happens when a novelist forces his heroine to swallow arsenic and then feels the poison working through his own body? In Elif Shafak’s In One Brief Moment All Eternity, this is not a metaphor. On the morning Gustave Flaubert writes Emma Bovary’s death scene, he vomits; his intestines cramp; he retches over himself. “Who would believe that excruciating stomach pains have struck him because he has poisoned a woman who exists solely in his imagination?” The question is Shafak’s starting point and the novel’s driving tension.

This book is about the strange, intimate, mutually consuming relationship between a writer and his creation. It is also about the women Flaubert loved, wounded, ignored and transmuted into fiction: his mother, his nursemaid Julie, his sister Caroline, his mistress Louise Colet and the Egyptian dancer Kuchuk Hanem. And it is about what happens when those women, real and imagined, get to speak.

Shafak reconstructs Flaubert’s life from childhood to death, beginning with the famous opening scene in which the novelist writes Emma’s suicide and suffers alongside her. From there, we travel back to his boyhood in Rouen, where he grows up in a house that is also a hospital and a morgue; witnesses dissections and mistakes a corpse on the slab for his beloved nursemaid.

We follow him through boarding school, where he is bullied and called “the family idiot;” through his disastrous attempts to study law in Paris; through his travels to Egypt, Istanbul and Beirut; and through the writing of Madame Bovary, its obscenity trial, the siege of Paris, the Commune and the deaths of everyone he loves. It is a capacious novel, spanning decades and continents. It wears its research lightly but visibly.

Structurally, however, Shafak has done something more interesting than straightforward biographical fiction. Interspersed with the third-person narrative of Flaubert’s life are thirty first-person monologues, voices, most of them female, many belonging to women from Flaubert’s life and imagination. Some belong to historical figures: his mother, his sister, his mistress and the prosecutor’s wife who secretly read the ‘obscene’ novel her husband condemned. Others are fictional: the corpse on the dissecting table, the madwoman on the church steps, the belly dancer Kuchuk Hanem, even Jamilah, the camel from the circus of his childhood. Each voice is given a chapter and each chapter titled with a colour.

The conceit is explicit. Shafak draws on Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, the Persian poem in which thirty birds journey to find the legendary Simorgh, only to discover that they themselves are the object of their quest. “Si morgh” means “thirty birds.” Flaubert, the novel suggests, is his own Simorgh. He is also, in some sense, the sum of the women who shaped him. The thirty voices are him; he is each of them.

The novel succeeds most powerfully in its treatment of Flaubert. Shafak does not sentimentalise him. He is vain, self-absorbed and often petulant; he despises the bourgeoisie while depending on his father’s money; he treats his mistress, Louise Colet, with a casual cruelty that is hard to forgive. But she also shows us his loneliness, his terror of disappointing his father, his desperate need for his mother’s approval and his conviction that he is “the family idiot.”

This book is about the strange, intimate, mutually consuming relationship between a writer and his creation. It is also about the women Flaubert loved, wounded, ignored and transmuted into fiction.

Flaubert is rendered strange and vulnerable - the boy who eats verdigris from copper pipes because he wants to know what the colour tastes like; the man who writes Emma’s death and then weeps, a writer for whom literature is not a career but a possession, a form of madness.

The thirty voices, however, are a mixed achievement. Some are electric: the corpse on the dissection table, a murdered prostitute, speaks with a furious, idiomatic energy. The madwoman whose son was killed during the cholera outbreak is heartbreaking. Kuchuk Hanem is given a dignity and interiority that Flaubert’s own travel writings denied her. But other voices feel less individuated. The prosecutor’s wife is a good idea that never quite becomes a character. The translator Eleanor Marx, who will later die by arsenic herself, is given a poignant arc: she translates Madame Bovary while her own life unravels, but her voice is sometimes too close to Shafak’s, too contemporary in its cadences.

Then there is a deeper problem. Shafak’s project is to give voice to the women Flaubert silenced or overlooked. But the novel’s structure means that these women are still, in a sense, speaking for him, about him and in relation to him. They are thirty facets of a single man’s life. This is not a failure; it is arguably the point. But it does raise the question of whether the women ever fully escape his orbit.

Emma, the novel’s most prominent female consciousness, is acutely aware of the irony: “Gustave Flaubert thinks he knows the answer. As the self-anointed connoisseur of all things feminine, he assumes he has special access to the female mind.” She resents him, mocks him and accuses him of making her death grotesque and prolonged.

But she is still his creature, still defined by his imagination. Shafak knows this, and the novel’s self-consciousness about its own project is one of its strengths. But it also means that the book sometimes feels like an argument rather than a story: a corrective to Flaubert rather than a fully realised novel in its own right.

The novel’s historical sweep is both its ambition and its burden. Shafak wants to show us Flaubert against the backdrop of revolution, war, famine and the Commune. She asks what literature can do when the world is falling apart. But the sheer volume of historical incident sometimes overwhelms the intimate story at the novel’s heart.

Shafak is a writer of immense compassion. She wants us to feel the weight of history pressing on her characters. But the novel is at its best when it is smallest: Flaubert as a boy, watching his father dissect a corpse; Flaubert as a young man, falling in love with a married woman on a beach; Flaubert as an old man, sitting in a cemetery, talking to ghosts.

What remains after the final page is the image of a writer who loved his fictional characters so fiercely that their suffering became his own. Shafak’s Flaubert is not the cold realist of literary legend but a man who wept when he killed Emma, felt arsenic in his own stomach and understood that “nothing human can ever be alien to literature.” The novel’s great insight is that this kind of identification is not a weakness but a condition of art. To write a character is to become them, at least for a while. To give voice to the silenced is to recognise that they were never entirely silent. Even Emma, whom Flaubert believed he had created, had begun to create him.

The reviewer is a PhD scholar in English literature at the University of Faisalabad.