“The nihilism of the imaginary, as it is elaborately anatomized in The Family Idiot, is [not] a mere nineteenth-century curiosity or a local feature of some specifically French middle-class culture; nor is it a private obsession of Jean-Paul Sartre himself. Turning things into images, abolishing the real world, grasping the world as little more than a text or sign-system—this is notoriously the very logic of our own consumer society, the society of the image or the media event . . . [The Family Idiot] may well speak with terrifying immediacy [today].”

Fredric Jameson, on the unabridged edition | New York Times

“A virtuoso performance. . . . For all that this book does to make one reconsider his life, The Family Idiot is less a case study of Flaubert than it is a final installment of Sartre’s mythology.”

New York Review of Books, on the unabridged edition

“The Family Idiot, Sartre’s last magnum opus, a penetrating and challenging analysis of Gustave Flaubert, has remained less well known than his earlier works, in large measure because of the inordinate length of the original version. Catalano’s superb, masterful abridgment, together with his introduction and occasional explanatory notes, is destined to stimulate important new scholarly explorations by philosophers, psychologists, students of literature, and so many others.”

William McBride, Purdue University