Customer Reviews

Madame Bovary

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Since Amazon lumps all the reviews for all editions of a title together, just to be clear, I am reviewing this Kindle Edition:

Madame Bovary (Illustrated with 12 original illustrations)

This version is great. It's well formatted and includes all of the original illustrations (something even many print editions are missing).

Recommended as a great Kindle edition.

I have been looking forward to reading "Madame Bovary" for a long time. Because it was the only version available In our public library, I was regrettably forced to approach this French masterpiece through the tortured English of Eleanor Marx Aveling's (youngest daughter of Karl Marx). Aveling's translation is itself called "classic", but here the term only means it's the first and oldest version. It's hard to imagine a worse job.

I found myself forgetting the heroine's degradation and final tragic end because of the distraction of struggling to plow through Aveling's almost unimaginably bad writing. She committed every translating crime. It's all the more culpable when applied to this great novel, considered by many the greatest novel ever written; it's certainly one of the very most influential. In utter opposition to the goals of this timeless wordsmith, word choices were laughably inaccurate, prepositions random and indecipherable, the tortured English syntax was straggling and labyrinthine, peculiar tense equivalents yielded confusing messages (one famous tense obfuscation left one reader wondering whether or not the key couple had or had not made love!), while her Anglicization of antique French words, were often eccentric to the point of gibberish.

It is a literary travesty that this translation is still in print and widely circulated. Time and again, I resolved not merely to abandon the reading but to complain to the library and re-translate it myself.

As I Googled not only Flaubert but also looked up information about period literature, French history and the record of other Mme Bovary translations (there are eleven famous ones), I discovered all the more, just how bad Aveling's rendition is.

Flaubert, the father of the realistic novel, took enormous pains over detail - famously laboring to find "le mot juste", as he worked to the limits of the exquisite French language of which he is an unparalleled prose master. His goal was to clearly evoke human experience - its depths of passion and pathos - relying on objective description rather than subjective proclamation. To that end, this first genius of "show-don't-tell", painted characters and mise-en-scene through the brush-strokes of words .

Mme Bovary's sentence structure, style and perfectionistic choices of word and phrase - were worked and reworked by the author, first during the four years of its initial production and throughout his entire life; he was still at work on it when he died. He succeeded in calling forth the infinite range of human experience scarcely informing us of anything beyond what our senses themselves could have told us had we been present. Through Flaubert's descriptions, our sensory organs manage to convey the interior experience of the extensive cast of characters from start to finish: their fully fleshed lives and deaths, on all levels - moral, sexual, emotional, intellectual and spiritual.

Since I now know that other translators have succeeded at making Flaubert available to the English language reader, I no longer feel the need of replacing Aveling's version immediately! However, I do feel obliged to warn prospective readers to beware of this translation* . Eleanor Marx Aveling herself lived a life of romantic tragedy - like Flaubert's heroine, committing suicide at a young age. What a sad irony that it is Aveling's legacy to fail grievously to do justice to the tale of genius of her fictional sister !

*Opinions differ about other versions, but I see more concordance recommending Lowell Bair, Gerard Hopkins and Mildred Marmur.

It appears that this edition of the book was created by scanning a printed book. Footnotes appear in the middle of the page, and there are some typos that suggest faulty optical character recognition, such as confusing "sigh" and"sign", or rendering "mere" as "Mère".
I wish I'd bought a different edition.

This is what it says it is: a public domain text with hypertext navigation that allows the user to easily move from the contents page to the individual chapters and sections. Most public domain texts are just Project Gutenberg texts rendered into the Kindle format. This text was carefully constructed to make navigation easy.

This is one of a few classics of our time. When it was first published in 1857 it was consider a public scandal. Read en enjoy!