THREE TALES <i> by Gustave Flaubert (NAL: $4.95) </i>

Gustave Flaubert’s last completed work, “Three Tales” was widely admired during his lifetime. “A Simple Heart,” a poignant account of the life of a devoted servant, recalls the lucid, insightful prose of “Madame Bovary.” Like the novels “Salambo” and “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” the short stories “The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitalier” and “Herodias” anticipate the exoticism of late 19th- Century Decadent prose, but Flaubert was too disciplined a writer to indulge in the flamboyant excesses of that extravagant style. In Oscar Wilde’s play (and other Decadent works), the story of Salome is an opulent fable of passion, vengeance and the conflict between lust and spirituality. Flaubert reduces Salome and Iaokanann (John the Baptist) to secondary characters and focuses his attention on the Tetrarch, Herod Antipas, turning an Oriental tragedy into a study of a political man whose moral cowardice makes him a pawn in the hands of less scrupulous players.