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Title: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert ISBN: 0-553-21341-5 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 June, 1982 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.29 (147 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Arguably the most influential novel ever written
Comment: This is not among my few favorite novels, but no one who is sensitive to great literature can fail to see the brilliance of this work. In doing a bit of background work, I made the following discoveries:
Virtually every French writer of the late 19th acknowledged Flaubert as their model. In England, Thomas Hardy essentially tried to write Flaubertian novels in an English rural context. Later in England, D. H. Lawrence explicitly wrote novels that were polemical to Flaubert, so that he wrote in reaction against MADAME BOVARY. In Russia, Tolstoy decided to write his own version of the story of Emma Bovary, ANNA KARENINA. In the 20th century, James Joyce--who was proud of how few writers he had studied--confessed that he had read virtually every line of Flaubert and himself tried to carry to the furthest extreme the Flaubertian dictum of art for arts sake. And this is merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Is this the most influential novel ever written? I honestly don't know, but if one wanted to construct a case for that assertion, a very, very powerful one could be made.
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: 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.
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Title: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Mona Simpson ISBN: 067978330X Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 10 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa, Natasha Wimmer ISBN: 0312421729 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad ISBN: 0486264645 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 July, 1990 List Price(USD): $1.50 |
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Title: Dubliners by James Joyce ISBN: 0486268705 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 May, 1991 List Price(USD): $2.00 |
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Title: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Constance Garnett ISBN: 0553211757 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 June, 1984 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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