Customer Reviews

Madame Bovary (Dover Thrift Editions)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Making a statement like Madame Bovary is the "greatest" novel ever written would be superfluous. It could be argued that it is the most perfectly written novel in the history of letters and that in creating it, Flaubert mastered the genre. What can't be argued is that it is one of the most influential novels ever written. It changed the face of literature as no other novel has, and has been appreciated and acknowledged by virtually every important novelist who was either Flaubert's contemporary or who came after him.

It's interesting to see the range in opinion that still surrounds this novel. Some of the Readers here at Amazon are morally affronted by the novel's central character, viewing her as something sinister and "unlikeable," and panning the novel for this reason. Such a reaction recalls the negative reviews Bovary engendered soon after its initial publication. It was attacked by many of the authorities of French literature at the time for being ugly and perverse, and for the impression that the novel presented no properly moral frame. These readers didn't "like" Emma much either, and they took their dislike out on her creator.

But this is one of the factors making Madame Bovary "modern". One of the hallmarks of modern novels is that they often portray unsympathetic characters, and Emma certainly falls into this category. How can we as readers "like" a woman who elbows her toddler daughter away from her so forcefully that the child "fell against the chest of drawers, and cut her cheek on the brass curtain-holder." After this pernicious behavior, Emma has a few brief moments of self-castigation and maybe even remorse, but very soon is struck by "what an ugly child" Berthe is. Emma's self-centeredness borders on solipsism. For readers looking for maternal instincts in their female characters or for a depiction of a devoted wife, they had better turn to Pearl S. Buck and The Good Earth, perhaps, rather than to Flaubert.

Much has been made of Flaubert's attempts to remove himself from the narrative, that he was searching for some sort of ultimate objectivity. His narrative technique is much more complex than that, however. It is his employment of a shifting narrative, sometimes objective, sometimes subjective, that again is an indicator of the novel's modernity. At times the narrator is merely reporting events or is involved in providing descriptive details. Yet often the authorial voice makes rather plain how the reader is to look at Emma and her plebeian persona. When she finally succumbs to Rodolphe and thinks she is truly in love, Flaubert becomes downright cynical: " `I've a lover, a lover,' she said to herself again and again, revelling in the thought as if she had attained a second puberty. At last she would know the delights of love, the feverish joys of which she had despaired. She was entering a marvelous world where all was passion, ecstasy, delirium."

Emma is a neurasthenic, in the modern sense, but in the 19th century she would have been said to suffer from hysteria, a mental condition diagnosed primarily in women. When her lovers leave her, she has what amounts to nervous breakdowns. After Rodolphe leaves her she makes herself so sick that she comes near death. Her imagination is much too powerful and too impressionable for her own good. This is part of the reason for Flaubert's oft-repeated quote, "Bovary, c'est moi." Flaubert was a neurasthenic as well and could easily work himself into a swoon as a result of his imaginative flights. There is even conjecture that he may have been, like Dostoevsky, an epileptic, and it is further intimated that this disorder was brought on by nerves, though this may be dubious, medically speaking.

Madame Bovary is not flawless, but it comes awfully close. It is one of the great controlled experiments in the fiction of any era. It even anticipates cinematic technique in many instances, but particularly in the scene at the Agricultural Fair. Note how Flaubert juxtaposes the utterly mundane activities and speeches occurring in the town square with Rodolphe's equally inane seduction of Emma in the empty Council Chamber above the square:

"He took her hand and she did not withdraw it."

"`General Prize!' cried the Chairman.'"

"`Just now, for instance, when I came to call on you...'"

"Monsieur Bizet of Quincampoix."

"`...how could I know that I should escort you here?'"

"Seventy francs!"

"`And I've stayed with you, because I couldn't tear myself away, though I've tried a hundred times.'"

"Manure!"

This is representative Flaubert. With a few deft strokes, he lays the whole absurdity of both the seduction and the provincial's activities bare.

If you have read this book previously and have come away feeling demoralized and even angered, please try reading it again, this time concentrating on the richness of its metaphors, Flaubert's mastery of foreshadowing, symbolism and description. Maybe you will come away with your viewpoint changed. For those who have not yet read this classic of classics, I know that if your mind remains open, you will come away with an appreciation for this master-novelist and for this monumental work.

This novel both starts and ends with the story of Charles, the title character's husband. Emma, his wife, thinks that Charles is incredibly boring, which to her mostly means that he's lacking in ambition and masculinity. He is also not very smart, though he does have a lot of other enviable traits.

Charles is honest, hardworking, conscientious, uncomplaining and relatively good at his chosen profession (he's a country doctor). In Flaubert's time, just as in our day, for a physician to be good he had to consciously practice as little of his craft as he could get away with. We're told that Charles doesn't prescribe much to his patients besides laxatives and sleep aids, always fearing that he'd hurt them with anything more substantial. Flaubert was a son of the chief surgeon of the biggest hospital in Normandy, and he obviously knew the realities of the medical profession well. The only proactive medical decision described in the book - the unnecessary maiming of a stable boy named Hyppolite - is conceived and urged not by Charles, but by the pharmacist Homais, who is the novel's biggest villain.

If Charles is so great, why does Emma hate him so much? The answer is suggested by the nature of the men with whom she chooses to cuckold him. Emma's first lover Rodolphe is the most macho character in the novel, with the possible exception of the international opera star Lagardy whom she can only admire from afar and of a mysterious vicomte she once meets at a ball, and whom she can't have either. Rodolphe had had a lot of affairs and is never shy or insecure about anything. Unlike Charles, who truly loves her, Rodolphe can easily go in and out of the baroque, flowery language in which seducers usually talk in the cheap romance novels Emma had been devouring since childhood.

Her second lover, Leon, is somewhere between Rodolphe and her husband on the all-important manliness scale. When he tries to seduce her, she repulses his initial advances and he shyly apologises. A description of that is followed by a revealing sentence: "Emma was seized with a vague fear at this shyness, more dangerous to her than the boldness of Rodolphe when he advanced to her open-armed". Eventually Leon gets the hint.

Emma's impatience with Charles's literal-mindedness and her strong desire to be lied to are made explicit in a scene that follows the death of Charles's father. Charles is being typically sincere about his mourning, shedding tears and saying all the things people usually say when their loved ones die. Emma is so bored with all that that immediately afterwards she welcomes the chance to talk to the shopkeeper and usurer Lheroux, who practically drowns her in insincerity every time they meet. Lying, noticing other people's lies - those things are less boring to her than honesty for the same reason that the romance novels she reads are more interesting to her than the real world.

Because of their secularism most modern reviewers of this book concentrate on the corrosive effects on Emma only of the sappiness and romanticism of the novels she loves so much. Charles's mother, however, diagnoses a very different problem when she calls them "bad books, works against religion, and in which they mock at priests in speeches taken from Voltaire. But all that leads you far astray, my poor child," she goes on. "Anyone who has no religion always ends by turning out badly."

Does it say anything about Flaubert himself that he put such words into a novel that ends with the heroine's suicide? Can it really be that Charles's mother was speaking for the novelist here? Perhaps. While Flaubert has obvious sympathy for Emma, he never shows any such feelings for the pharmacist Homais, a militant secularist who mocks Christianity on dozens of the novel's pages. Homais is portrayed in a negative light in every single scene in which he appears, while his biggest adversary in arguments over religion, the priest Bournisien, is usually shown sympathetically.

One of the fun things about reading any classic novel is finding all of its inevitable anachronisms - things that point out how radically our world has changed since the book was first published. For example, early in the novel Flaubert goes on for a while about how ugly Charles's hat was. Nothing made in that period seems ugly to us now, does it? Fine art museums built in the 21st century routinely look worse than 19th century prisons.

It's hard to believe now that Flaubert had to defend this essentially moralistic tale in court against charges of immorality. He was especially criticized for the phrase "platitudes of marriage", incorrectly believed by some at the time to vaguely justify Emma's adulteries. Modern would-be censors would far more likely be incensed by the mention of "the ardent races of the south", which appears during a description of the singer Lagardy.

Emma and Charles implicitly agree with each other about their respective values in the sexual market. He can't believe he managed to marry someone so far above his league. She can't believe she ended up with someone so far below hers. Since they come from very similar economic backgrounds, their mismatch has nothing to do with social class. It is biological in nature - one of the obvious problems is that Charles simply doesn't have enough testosterone to be able to genuinely attract women of Emma's level of beauty.

Is what's good in the sexual market good for a civilized society as a whole? It's hard to believe that Flaubert would have been uninterested in that question while writing this book. He had certainly depicted Charles as being more productive and useful to the world than Emma. And at the very least, Charles holds his own on that score against Leon and Rodolphe. By far the most emotionally moving part of the novel is the last chapter, which concentrates on Charles's fate after his wife's death.

If you read up on Flaubert, you'll inevitably learn that he worked hard on his style. He spent countless hours getting each word of each sentence just right, treating his novels almost like poetry. I liked Flaubert's clear sense of morality and his unsentimental insightfulness about relations between the sexes, so I would have been happy to report to you that I loved his use of language as well. But that would be a lie. Having read the whole thing in French, I found its style clear and unobtrusive, but nothing more than that. Since French is not my native language, I very well could have missed some of the great man's stylistic subtleties. However, I did not find anything extraordinary about the language of the two English translations I've looked through either. If the translators involved were aware of Flaubert's stylistic awesomeness, then they clearly failed to reproduce it in English. This is, of course, not impossible, so I should probably withhold final judgment on it.

If you liked this review, you can find more of them at [...]

Madame Bovary is perhaps the finest French novel of the 19th century, and that is really saying something; consider that this was the century that produced Balzac, Zola, Maupassant, Hugo, Dumas, and Stendhal. Madame Bovary is one of the greatest anti-heroes in all of Western literature, as she leads the reader through a tragedy that explores the extremes of ambivalence. Masterful and compelling. An absolute must-read.

HOWEVER, this particular edition (published by General Books LLC) is absolutely atrocious. I have never seen a book so rife with typographical errors -- it's like reading a Kindle transcription gone horribly wrong. Several times, Charles is referred to as "Charlea", and many of the chapters are divided improperly and begin nonsensically. Spend a little more $$$ and get the Penguin edition, or one that is translated by Lydia Davis.

I will break my review into two parts since I would like to separate out my ratings of the novel and the Audio book. First, I'll review the audio book.

Ronald Pickup was the reader and I think this is one of the better audio books I have listened to. The narrator did a great job on the characterizations and made each person sound distinct and portrayed them well. The mother-in-law sounded self righteous, the chemist sounded like a know-it-all, and all of the others sounded just right. I have listened to enough audio books to really appreciate a good reader and I would give him 5 stars.

I had mixed feelings about the novel itself. The author had an extremely beautiful and descriptive way with words, but the result was that it moved a little bit slow for me at first. By the middle of the book, I was able to appreciate it more, but I am not a great fan of this very descriptive style. It reminded me somewhat of the writing of Proust.

The story itself was a serious tragedy (in a literary sense), so don't read this if you are looking to be uplifted or are looking for a `happily ever after' type ending. I can see why this is classified as great literature because it effectively teaches the consequences of certain choices.

I probably disliked this novel as much as I did 'Sons and Lovers'. For a while I just thought I'd been reading too many French writers (Huysmans, Sand,....) but it was much deeper than that.

Although Madame Bovary is the central character, and an intriguing one at that, I don't believe that she is any more than a vehicle for Flaubert to vent his virtiole against men. There are four principle male characters in this novel and we see them reflected and caricatured in their responses to mixed-up, not altogether lovable Emma.

There is husband Charles who is overwhelmed by the love he feels from Emma - he sees himself as SO lucky. But he is blind - seeing none of Emma's distress, or philandering. And he is not very successful at what he does anyway.

Then there is lover Rodolphe. He is the ultimate selfish prig of a man. He reflects, as he walks away from Emma - having raised her hopes of a new more exciting life - that she was a wonderful mistress but he couldn't possibly compromise his selected way of life. Not for any woman, no matter how rewarding she might be. And when she appeals to him for help, she gets nothing from him.

The second lover, Leon, is a more youthful and inexperienced participant in Emma's life. But later he does marry (not Emma, of course) so it is not commitment he shies away from. Nevertheless he fails Emma.

Finally there is the chemist Homais, Charles's 'colleague'. He also has no sensitivity to Emma, almost misses seeing her at all. Like Charles, he is unsuccessful in some of his ventures, but he has such comically grand illusions about himself.

All four men exhibit fundamental flaws. For me Charles and Leon have some saving graces. But none of them I have much sympathy for.

And then there is the matter of Emma's decline - not due to her affairs. Was Flaubert unable to undermine Emma because of the affairs, because of Emma's selfish self-seeking? Did he have to create other artifices to inflict upon her - and the men around her (not that Homais really notices) - to give the story a 'moral'?

The writing is spectacular - Flaubert was a wonderful observer and expresser of ideas. But for me, good writing is more than observation and a facility with words. It is the structure of the novel that failed me.

Madame Bovary is a stand-out novel more for how and when it was written than for any virtues imbedded within the text. What was novel writing before Flaubert? Actually, it was very much like the flowery novels that Emma feeds on--Victorian in the high-flown ideals of romantic love and perhaps not too far off from the Harlequin Romances of today's marketplace, but without the sexual innuendo.

Flaubert wrote perhaps the first novel that frankly discusses a married woman's disenchantment, and while he is not a sympathetic author, his landmark novel was part of a movement that changed the way writers write about their characters. For that reason alone it is worth the read--it must have been a breath of fresh air in a marketplace full of novels that featured limpid-eyed damsels and sensitive, altruistic and well-dressed heroes.

This is also a surprisingly modern cautionary tale about the dangers of getting in over one's head monetarily--Emma's dramatic fall from financial grace is not that far off from stories that are so common they don't even make today's newspapers.

Read Madame Bovary for the story alone, and you will have read only a story of one woman's tragic life. Read it with an eye towards its place in the history of novel writing, and you will come away with something to mull over and compare with any other book you read that features a strong-minded female.

5* for the Book, 1* for the version from General Books LLC

Madame Bovary is a bit of a classic. Other reviewers have done a great job reviwing the novel, I'm not going to rehash, I agree.

BUT if you are interested in buying this, be aware that "Madame Bovary" is published by a plethora of publishers, some reputable, some not - and many that are available are from Print on Demand Publishers reprinting copyright-expired books. And there are some truely awful reprints available, believe me. Some POD publishers produce quite good quality books, some do not. What you do need to do is check the publisher carefully for all these older "copyright expired" books. An outstanding example of "not good quality" is the reprint of "Madame Bovary" published by General Books LLC, which is a version that's scanned in using OCR technology (and using pretty poor quality OCR scanning equipment and software from the look of their books), is overall of very poor print quality, uses automated reproduction with no index, no illustrations and has a truely excessive number of typos.

To quote some specifics from the publisher's own web site:
"We created your book using OCR software that includes an automated spell check. Our OCR software is 99 percent accurate if the book is in good condition. However, with up to 3,500 characters per page, even one percent can be an annoying number of typos...."

"After we re-typeset and designed your book, the page numbers change so the old index and table of contents no longer work. Therefore, we usually remove them. Since many of our books only sell a couple of copies, manually creating a new index and table of contents could add more than a hundred dollars to the cover price...."

"Our OCR software can't distinguish between an illustration and a smudge or library stamp so it ignores everything except type. We would really like to manually scan and add the illustrations. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies...."

"We created your book using a robot who turned and photographed each page. Our robot is 99 percent accurate. But sometimes two pages stick together. And sometimes a page may even be missing from our copy of the book. We would really like to manually scan each page and buy multiple copies of each original. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies....."

General Books LLC books unfortunately have the reviews associated with the original or with better quality imprints associated with them. For the buyer that's not aware of this publisher this can result in a rather unfortunate purchasing decision.

A good rule of thumb for these Print on Demand publishers is to take a look at the cover - if it's a good quality illustration that reflects the content, there's a table of contents, and when you do the Look Inside thing there's no disclaimer saying you're looking at another book, and they've stated that they used facsimile reproduction technology (rather than OCR), it's usually a pretty safe bet. Conversely, if any of these are missing, you're taking a chance on the quality. I've bought a few based on my selection criteria above and they've been good quality. General Books LLC however, is a publisher to steer clear of at all costs.

(And if you do the look inside thing for General Books LLC version of this book, you will read the following...."This view is of the Paperback edition (2001) from Signet Classics. The Paperback edition (2009) from General Books LLC that you originally viewed is the one you'll receive if you click the Add to Cart button at left." So what you see is NOT what you will get.

If you have been unfortunate enough to buy the General Books LLC version by mistake, you can return to Amazon for a full refund (but check Amazon's return policy and process first).

The biggest problem I had reading this book was the language itself. I've often been told about how Flaubert is a master of prose, his painstaking French, etc. To be honest, I'm not really seeing it in the translation. This, again, might be a translator issue - the original translation (in my edition of the Dover Thrift) was published in 1886, and shows. It's written with all of the mundane stuffiness that has come to stereotype Victorian England, and the (overused) rhetorical exclamations seem like something out of a creative writing student's attempt to be melodramatic.

The language itself is stiff and unyielding, and in many areas I'd be hard-pressed to call it a translation so much as basic word-replacement. A good amount of the paragraphs are overly long, complex, and so frankly arcane compared to modern usage that I found myself pressed to reread not a few paragraphs. The problem is, in short, it carries all the plodding hypo-emotion of Victorian prose without the delight of Dickens, or the inevitable melancholy of, say, Hardy.

Then there are things I can't fault the translator for, I'm quite sure. A large portion of the book is taken up with eventually tedious and intricate descriptions of clothes, food, accessories, and so on. The problem with this is that, especially with the clothes, I felt like I was being so weighted down with jargon about 19th century dress that I couldn't actually extract the point Flaubert was attempting to make. Most of the descriptions outlive their usefulness, since I had understood what their point was long before they end. "Yes, it's a poor, rustic farming community," "Yes, it's a sumptuous meal," "Yes, this person dresses magnificently." It smacks of someone telling a joke and dragging it out too long so the punchline loses all power - most of the descriptions would have been more effective at perhaps a quarter of the length.

Then, there are the characters. The problem is that they can be effectively summed up in a single sentence. They're like theatrical archetypes - you have the loving-yet-hapless-and-somewhat-dimwitted husband Charles Bovary, you have the raised-in-a-convent-to-romanticize-romance Emma Bovary, and so on. They're generally flat and in 160 pages (my edition is around 200 pgs.), I've yet to be surprised or astonished by anything anyone would regard as a complex understanding of the human condition, which to me would be a no-brainer in a classic of such repute.

In all, the book is stiffly worded, uninspiring, tediously descriptive and rolling around in it's own display of attempted luxury, with characters that really show little insight into how humans are or act. I know what happens to Madame Bovary, and I have to say, I couldn't really care.

I heard this book mentioned so many times that I finally decided to read it. I don't understand its popularity. I even read some other reviews to see if I could figure it out. And I noticed that while many people disliked this book they still rated it four or five stars, hmmmm. Perhaps, this book with all of its adjectives is more beautiful in French maybe it is even poetic.... in English, however, I found that beauty to be lacking.

While, I sympathized with Emma's problem, her loneliness and unhappiness, the fact that no one around her understood her, I thought this book was just an easy, not too lengthy read and nothing more.

Flaubert earned a third star from me for attempting to recognize a woman's plight during that period when women didn't have much to look forward to. I think it is both commendable and a pity that he, a man, tried to write from a woman's perspective. It's a pity because it makes Emma less believable and more masculine.... and its commendable that he did attempt to recognize women like her.

Overall, this book is past its time and not a recommended read by me.

I hesitate to write a review of this book. It's such a classic who would need to hear another review of it? I've picked this book up at least 3 times, 2 of which were failures. This time I finished it!!! I *hate reading works in translations. I always worry I'm missing nuances AND I hate having a go between distancing me from the author. I was motivated because I've just finished Jualian Barnes' "Flaubert's Parrot". I was motivated to read Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" and "MB". All this build up and all I really have to say is MB is well worth your time.