Henry Andersen & Lars Kwakkenbos
The Reading of Pleasure, You Understand That I Am Narrating, 2026

You Understand That I am Narrating is a partial reprint of the transcript of the 1857 trial of M. Gustave Flaubert for the publication of Madame Bovary. Charges had been brought against the book on two counts: offence against public morals and offense against relious morals. Thought Flaubert was ultimately aquitted, the trial is a striking document of reading from the first years of the realist novel. In the novel’s condemnation, and in its defense, we can see some of the first attempts to grapple with the novel’s form, here couched within the broader question of influence, censorship, and artistic license.

The reader was developed with students over two work trips: the first to Montavoix, a refuge in the Jura mountains, and the second to the Atelier Musee Imprimerie des Malesherbes, on the edge of Paris.

A core concern for the trip to Montavoix was how to share some collective sense of the length, time and rhythms of the first novels, where (as historian Nicholas Dames notes) reading “assumes its partial, temporary, and temporally limited character.” We elected to read Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, from cover to cover, out-loud and together. In between readings, we would go for walks and begin the practical work on what would become the publication; letting the landscape and the rhythms of the reading feed into our way of working together. In this, we were hosted by architect Wim Cuyvers who lead discussions, cooked for us, and introduced us to the landscape.

In March, we travelled to Malesherbes where we printed the publication an semi-manual offset printer, together with artist and designer Alex Balgiu. We worked in layers and took turns to print and bind the reader. Each signature of the book presents a translation of the case against Madame Bovary, and each has been overlaid with contributions by students in graphic design, fine arts and illustration. Each contribution interacts differently with the text of the trail; alternately highlighting, obscuring or bracketing the text at hand. In each of these activities—collective reading, designing, printing and discussing, we see an intensified way of being together with text.