Product Description

An epic story of lust, cruelty, and sensuality, this historical novel is set in Carthage in the days following the First Punic War with Rome.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42840 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-29
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Book Information
An epic story combining lust, cruelty, riches, ritual and sensuality, few French historical novels can stand comparison with Salammbo.

Immediately after the protracted and crippling First Punic War with Rome, the Carthaginian army under Hamilcar was obliged to contend with a revolt by its unpaid mercenaries--an anarchic barbarian horde of mixed race--led by the Libyan Matho. It is a story of the most appalling savagery which Flaubert was anxious to render in spirit and in detail. His invention of the exotic and chilling Salammbo, priestess in the temple of the Goddess Tanit, and her obsessive relationship with Matho, lends dramatic unity to a tale of epic grandeur in which Flaubert gave full rein to his love of the gorgeous, the voluptuous and the bizarre.

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About the Author
Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821. After illness interrupted a career in law, he retired to live with his widowed mother and devote himself to writing. He achieved limited success in his own lifetime, but his fame and reputation grew steadily after his death in 1880.

Customer Reviews

the curse of the sacred veil...
An absolute blood-fest.
A tale of desire, lust, love and fury.
It's a novel on a grand scale, panoramic - an epic.
Tracing a story of blind unfulfilled love through a period of insurrection set in the fading glory of a once powerful city state, the plot fairly rips along.
Featuring huge sweeping battle scenes and bloody massacres - illustrated with descriptions of barbaric cruelty, canibalism and littered with gratuitous violence.
It's primitive, full of symbolism, savagery and blood-lust.
The main protagonist, Matho, a brute of a man - a leader of men, is driven to the verge of insanity whilst obsessively seeking to fulfil his lust and desire for the pure beauty of Salammbo - a vestal virgin, an innocent and a priestess.
All is here - loves confusion, corruption of power, the sweetness of victory, the bitterness of defeat, barbaric revenge and the tragic fulfilment of a prophesy - the curse of the sacred veil.

Carthage
Although this book is called Salammbo, she doesn't appear in it that much, and her story is just an incidental sideline to the main story. If you have read Flaubert before you will find this book somewhat different. If you like a bog standard historical novel you may find this tale a bit too exotic.

Salammbo is set in the second century BC. Carthage won't pay its mercenaries after the Punic Wars, and thus starts the Mercenary War. What this book shows is the horrors of war, and man's inhumanity to man. Prisoners of war are crucified or trampled underfoot by elephants amongst other indignities. Carthage is under siege at one stage and the inhabitants practice human sacrifice to appease the gods. The mercenaries that see this look on in shocked dismay, only for some of them to later carry out cannibalism.

This book is bloody and gory, and the story will keep you absorbed. It would make an excellent movie, but once again it won't be a book for everyones tastes.