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Title: Madame Bovary: Life in a Country Town by Gustave Flaubert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gerald Hopkins ISBN: 0192815644 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: April, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33
Rating: 5
Summary: The Apogee of the French Novel . . . At Least Until Proust
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: 5
Summary: Literary equivalent of watching an accident on the freeway
Comment: There aren't many surprises in Madame Bovary. Everything that you think is going to happen to the characters pretty much does. Emma's fate and that of her lapdog husband Charles are written in quickly drying cement from the first few chapters. All you can really do is sit back and watch with the sick fascination of an ambulance chaser as their unrelenting boredom, sadness, and unfulfilled dreams suck them swirling to their predestined ends.
And yet, this book provides much more than a good wallowing session. Madame Bovary is one of the best written novels I've ever read. Flaubert is a brilliant writer. The characters are so alive in their death-in-life dance that you can't help but sharply feel their pain and see how they might have lived their lives differently.
Madame Bovary is a classic of French literature, but it also speaks to our modern condition in an uncanny way. Anyone searching for meaning in their life will relate to the pains and struggles of these characters. If you've been thinking about reading this (I had it waiting on my shelf for about a decade) wait no longer. Read this remarkable novel now.
Rating: 5
Summary: one the best french literature novel
Comment: ...that is to say : this is one the books that can't be translated, becauses it uses all potentialities of french language. Those who admire in this book the cruelty and truth of the psychological portraits mustn't forget that Flaubert's dream was to write a "book about nothing, that would be held only by the force of the style". The story didn't interest him and in his correspondance you see how he got bored while writing it. Personnaly I don't like this kind of "feminine life in the country and loss of illusions that is to entail" but the style is just amazing. Proust said that Flaubert had "a grammatical genius". That's why anyone who can read french might throw his english version. Also, don't be obsessed by the famous "Madame Bovary, c'est moi". Flaubert wrote this book to get rid of his romantic tendancies : hence this mix of sympathy and deep cruelty about the stupidity of his heroin. This cruelty is reinforced by the use of the "focalisation interne" (when the writer writes from the point of view of the character) and the perfect neutrality : we live from the inside Emma's dreams and feel how ridiculous they are, and then, from the outside, we see them being slowly destructed. Read this masterpiece, and focus your attention on the style, and the construction (otherwise the book has little interest!)
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Title: Madame Bovary (Cliffs Notes) by James L. Roberts ISBN: 0822007800 Publisher: Cliffs Notes Pub. Date: June, 1964 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Anna Karenina (Modern Library Classics) by Leo Tolstoy, Leonard J. Kent, Nina Nikolaevna Berberova, Constance Black Garnett ISBN: 067978330X Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 10 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Constance Garnett ISBN: 0553211757 Publisher: Bantam Classics Pub. Date: 01 July, 1984 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad ISBN: 0486264645 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: August, 1990 List Price(USD): $1.50 |
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Title: Dubliners by James Joyce ISBN: 0486268705 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: August, 1991 List Price(USD): $1.50 |
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