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Title: Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners (Oxford World's Classics (Oxford University Press).) by Gustave Flaubert, Margaret Mauldon, Mark Overstall ISBN: 0-19-284039-8 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: July, 2004 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1

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Average Customer Rating: 4.29 (147 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Still luscious after all these years
Comment: 150 years on, this reads as freshly as anything published this year. The point, surely, is not whether Emma Bovary is a good woman, or a bad mother, as some reviewers seem to think. What we get is a woman who is entirely human. Her ultimately fatal desires are believable, her weaknesses as common today as they ever were.

A post-modern Emma Bovary would divorce, take the kid, and juggle childcare with a career in casting or magazine journalism. Flaubert's heroine had no such options. Her dreams manifested themselves in the futile search for a transforming love - a goal as seductive today as ever.

Just as Cervantes wrote "Don Quixote" in part as satire on the literary tastes of the day, Flaubert takes aim at the unrealistic romance novels of his time. His antidote is a story of such realism we recognise every character and every human foible. The sexual descriptions, while not explicit in a modern sense, are still remarkably frank, their power transparent.

The author most similar, in my view, is Flaubert's English contemporary Thomas Hardy. I am a huge fan of Hardy, but none of his heroes, not Jude nor the Mayor of Casterbridge nor even Tess comes to us as intimately as the beautiful, ardent, bored and ultimately wasted Emma B.

Rating: 5
Summary: The Apogee of the French Novel . . . At Least Until Marcel
Comment: Let's begin with Nabokov's "Lectures on Literature," where he introduces "Madame Bovary" as follows: "The book is concerned with adultery and contains situations and allusions that shocked the prudish philistine government of Napoleon III. Indeed, the novel was actually tried in a court of justice for obscenity. Just imagine that. As if the work of an artist could ever be obscene." Written over a five-year period, "Madame Bovary" was published serially in a magazine in 1856 where, despite editorial attempts to purge it of offensive material, it was cited for "offenses against morality and religion." Fortunately, Flaubert won his case and "Madame Bovary" remains to this day one of the masterpieces of French and world literature. Indeed, in Nabokov's view, the novel's influence is notable: "Without Flaubert, there would have been no Marcel Proust in France, no James Joyce in Ireland. Chekhov in Russia would not have been quite Chekhov."

The story of Emma Bovary is well known and uncomplicated. Set in the provincial towns of Tostes and Yonville (it is subtitled "Patterns of Provincial Life"), with adulterous interludes in Rouen, "Madame Bovary" narrates the life of Charles Bovary and Emma Rouault. Charles, an "officier de sante"--a licensed medical practitioner without a medical degree--meets Emma while tending to her injured father. Charles is married at that time to the first Madame Bovary, also called Madame Dubuc, a widow and thin, ugly woman who dominates the mild-mannered Charles from the very beginning. "It was his wife [Madame Dubuc] who ruled: in front of company he had to say certain things and not others, he had to eat fish on Friday, dress the way she wanted, obey her when she ordered him to dun nonpaying patients. She opened his mail, watched his every move, and listened through the thinness of the wall when there were women in his office."

When Madame Dubuc dies a few short years after their marriage, it appears that Charles is fortunate, for he is not only freed from the shrewish oppression of his wife, but enabled to court and marry the beautiful Emma. It is the eight-year marriage of Charles and Emma that embodies the tale of "Madame Bovary," a tale marked by Emma's ennui, her dissatisfaction with the unsatisfied yearnings of bourgeois marriage in a small provincial town, her steadily growing sensual insatiability, her adulteries with a series of men. It is this marriage, too, that gives us one of literature's great cuckolds, Charles Bovary.

"Madame Bovary" has often been described as a realistic novel and, insofar as it tells a seemingly ordinary tale of sensual longing and adultery while, at the same, time depicting characters and sensibilities typical of bourgeois, philistine rural France during the reign of Louis Phillipe, it is grimly realistic. It is also, however, a deeply psychological novel, one in which Flaubert brilliantly probes the feelings, the sensations, the romantic longings and dreamscapes of Emma Bovary. Above all, "Madame Bovary" is the apogee of the French novel prior to Proust's Parnassian achievement, a novel whose poetic language and artistic rendering transcend mere narrative and elevate Flaubert's work to that of high literary art, a novel for the ages. Read it in the original French if you can; if not, then read it in Frances Steegmuller's outstanding English translation.

Rating: 1
Summary: buy the book...but buy a different edition
Comment: My comments tend towards what some might deem the pedantic. While I will not use this review to discuss Flaubert's work, I do believe that he has been done a great disservice. I bought this edition for its critical apparatus and Flaubert's correspondence included at the end of the novel, but now I wish I hadn't. This particular edition is wrought with more typographical errors than I have ever seen in a book from a professional press. I found this to be distracting, to say the least, and caught myself looking for the next mistake rather than paying attention to the work itself. I wonder if Bantam supposes that this book is purchased only by students (it is the cheapest edition afterall) who leave it on the shelf as they read the Cliff's notes in order to squeak by on the weekly quiz. There is a ratio of at least one mistake per 25 pages (sometimes even two mistakes appear on the same page!).

Here are just a couple examples of the more greivous mistakes: p. 8 - "Where should he go to prctice his new profession?" p. 187 - "...[she] even began going to chuch less frequently..."

I realize that I tend to be more exacting than most, but I should think this to be a barrier for anyone. My suggestion - buy a different edition.