Customer Reviews

Madame Bovary: Life in a Country Town (World's Classics)

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A simple story really: Charles Bovary, an insensitive, crude, socially awkward oaf, sleazes his way into the medical profession and becomes a doctor in small French provinces at the danger of the citizenry. Additionally, Charles marries a young, beautiful woman, Emma, who intoxicated on romance novels, expects her marriage to Charles to be as grand and splendid as the romances she has gorged on all her life. As one would expect, her marriage is hellish, isolating, and frustrating; Emma grows more and more irritable with her husband and looks to allay her frustrations by spending beyond her means and by engaging in affairs with fops, charlatans, and other mountebanks who seduce Emma with the illusions of romance she has read in her novels. Her growing debts and growing disillusionment with her lovers reaches a climax that I'll save for the reader.

The novel's plot is actually a vehicle for Flaubert's real agenda: to skewer the vulgarities and pettiness of the middle-class. He shows no mercy and is rather misanthropic in his portrayal of his characters. Nevertheless, his vision is a true and vigorous one. This is not a novel for people who want to sit back and enjoy a French period piece romance. To the contrary, this novel kills romance and in fact Flaubert was once dubbed "The Hang-Man of the Romantics."

Destined for doom and misfortune, Madame Bovary, the female protagonist, falls down the wrong corridor in search for a life of luxury. She marries a country doctor in the hopes of living a better life that suits her elite tastes but instead becomes tangled and twisted in romances and extra marital relationships, betraying her family and her marital oath. Madame Bovary is never fulfilled, only full of distaste of the life that her husband has provided her. Her marriage is the ultimate source of unhappiness and Madame Bovary is unwilling and perhaps unable to turn their marriage around.

Her husband is an oaf at heart and is unwilling to help his wife out of her misery. But to do so would call for an entire change of heart and character. He is blind to his faults and perceives their marriage as a happy one. Until the bitter end, Bovary fails to see Madame Bovary as she really is, a frivolous and vain woman with dreams that he cannot fulfill.

One affair after another, one disappointment after another, Madame Bovary seeks happiness and fulfillment but finds none. She is wrong to expect from her husband what he cannot provide and wrong to find happiness elsewhere beyond the boundaries of their marriage.

Madame Bovary shows the wreckage of a marriage without hope. From the beginning, Madame Bovary expects too much and knows far too little about marital duties. Her expectations remain unfilled, her husband lost and
clueless.

Madame Bovary is a common housewife who runs amuck with their marriage and who never sees the wreck of an end in sight. Had she accepted her marital role then she would have never been part of the infamy bestowed upon her and might have found happiness. But she was seeking luxury and not happiness.

It is such a pity that we have grown so jaded that this scandalous book now seems tame. It is the classic tale of adultery and what happens if you go astray and refuse to be contented as a cow. The writing was magnificent.
I can sympathize to an extent with Emma. She was a true romantic, trapped in a dingy provincial town. Of course, if one is too jaded, one might find the ending akin to a country western song where the woman dies, the child dies, the lovers desert, and the long-suffering (albeit boring) husband dies.
If for no other reason, read this one for the sheer brilliance of the written word.

There are two reasons to learn French: The first is to finally understand the brilliance of Jerry Lewis' French translator and the other is to enjoy this book in its native tongue. How much more effete are words translated from one language to another, one culture to another and one age to another? . Was it not Flaubert himself in this book who so accurately described the impotence of words? Those who would condemn this book as sexist maudlin melodrama perhaps miss this one simple and timeless point - no matter how well you think you may understand others, or make yourself understood, language is limited and ultimately fails

I love this book so much I've read it twice. Delivered to me in much less time than expected. Madame Bovary goes through what a lot of us females may at one stage or another feel, although for me it is the details and description from the author that really gets you,"Charles' conversation was as flat as a street pavement, on which everybody's ideas trudged past....". She's so bored of him. You will laugh, but ultimately will sigh. utterly stunning work.

What was so beautiful to me about this book was its truth of human nature and relationships. We despise the ones who want us, and spurn the ones who would love us. You feel a relationship start to fade. It loses its excitement. But you don't accept it. You pretend it's not happening, and try even harder, act even more romantically, to try to reinspire your love, but it only pushes the other person even farther away. I knew I loved the book when I recognized in Emma the same feelings I try to hide from in myself.

I read the Oxford (Gerard Hopkins) translation which I didn't actually think was very good. Despite its 1981 copyright date the language had a stilted, perhaps "nineteenth century" feel to it. If you have to translate something anyway, may as well translate it into the modern idiom! The good news is that the book itself is so good, it shines through a few odd English words or confusing sentences.
Madame Bovary is wonderful precisely because Madame Bovary is so very unheroic and even despicable. Who hasn't wanted to escape his or her own life at one time or another? Madame Bovary is a woman deeply unhappy with her lot in life, and while we may sympathize with her alienation at times, she most certainly does not achieve the wisdom or heroism so often found in tragic characters. Flaubert describes a world in which all the characters are a little ridiculous (the book is frequently witty) and sometimes horrible and yet, very unusually, there seemed to be no character or even authorial voice that was somehow "above" this world, rather we are all intimately of it.

The item I order was delivered at the beginning of the time frame that was set. I would definitely buy from this user again.