Madame Bovary was written by legendary author Gustave Flaubert is widely considered to be one of the top 100 greatest books of all time. This great classic will surely attract a whole new generation of readers. For many, Madame Bovary is required reading for various courses and curriculums. And for others who simply enjoy reading timeless pieces of classic literature, this gem by Gustave Flaubert is highly recommended. Published by Classic Books International and beautifully produced, Madame Bovary would make an ideal gift and it should be a part of everyone's personal library.
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"Madame Bovary is like the railroad stations erected in its epoch: graceful, even floral, but cast of iron." --John Updike
From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Original Language: French --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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More About the Author
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), the younger son of a provincial doctor, briefly studied law before devoting himself to writing, with limited success during his lifetime. After the publication of Madame Bovary in 1857, he was prosecuted for offending public morals.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
103 of 108 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Hope Diamond of Novels,
By Bruce Kendall "BEK" (Southern Pines, NC) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (COMMUNITY FORUM 04) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Madame Bovary (Paperback)
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.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Madame Bovary,
This review is from: Madame Bovary: Life in a Country Town (Paperback)
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 [...]
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
An Absolutely Abominable Edition of one of the Greatest Novels of Western Literature,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Madame Bovary--Provincial Manners (Paperback)
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.
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