Customer Reviews

Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics)

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Typically Penguin Classics does a great job with translating foriegn classics, but in the case of Madame Bovary, they do not. I read two chapters in this book and had to keep going back and re-reading sentences and had the most difficult time trying to figure out what was trying to be conveyed. Finally, I drove over to my local library and checked out the Bantam Classics version and I am extremely pleased that I did. It reads so much better and is actually entertaining. Get the book, but get Lowell Bair's translation.

I first read Madame Bovary in Geoffrey Wall's translation for Penguin and throughout the book I felt as if something was off, this can't be the same novel acclaimed by many as the pinnacle of the written word as art. Then I picked up Francis Steegmuller's version and right from start the difference was palpable. Consider the following excerpt from when Emma's father tells Charles about the death of his own wife:

WALL:
"I dropped down under a tree, I wept, I called to the good Lord, I ranted at him... I just wanted to be like those moles... jiggered, you know... I thought as how other folks, just that second, had their nice warm little wives in their arms...I was out of my mind very near, stopped eating, I did."

STEEGMULLER:
"I lay down under a tree and cried. I talked to God, told him all kinds of crazy things... I wished I were dead, like the maggoty moles... I thought of how other men were holding their wives in their arms at that very moment... I was almost out of my mind. I couldn't eat."

Wall published his version in 1992, so he should have known that many readers are bound to pick up that Yodaesque tone at the end which also pops up in many other places, it does. From what little I can glean from the French text, his translation actually appears structurally more faithful than Steegmuller's, at least judging by the number and spacing of punctuations. And yet somehow it comes out as the more stilted of the two.

Wall should have heeded Flaubert's eerily prescient advice to his future translators, given right around the third page: (in Steegmuller's version) "For while he had a fair knowledge of grammatical rules, his translations lacked elegance." Wall clearly ignored the hint when he transmuted this to "For, though he just knew about his rules, his style was rather lacking in elegance."

To be fair though, Wall's notes and introduction are often helpful, and some readers may want to consider getting the cheap Penguin paperback edition as a reference supplement to Steegmuller's or some other better translation.

Madame Bovary is the greatest novel written by Gustave Flaubert. The 1855
masterpiece portrays in searing detail the tragic tale of a young girl whose dreams turned into nightmares; whose sandcastles are swept away by unfulfilled passion; whose young life is ended in a tragic death. Years before Tolstoy limned the adultress woman in his Anna Karenina we see the consequences which ensue when a middle class wife and mother breaks the seventh commandment.
The novel takes place near Rouen in the north of France. There are actually three Madame Bovarys in the story. Madame Bovary Sr. who is the mother of Charles Bovary dominates her weak son. Madame Bovary I is an ugly but wealthy woman who dies allowing Charles to wed the lovely Emma
Bovary who is the the famed woman of the book's title. Emma has grown up on a farm coddled by her widower father. She has immersed herself in romantic tales and spent time in a French convent. Emma dreams of castles in the air and a charming prince to take her to paradise. Today she would be a reader of Harlequin Romances. She is a virgin plum ripe for picking!
Charles Bovary ("bovine" meaning cow-like; also think "ovary for his scandolous wife Emma) is a dull, stupid and lethargic public health inspector. He is a good man but is a total dullard! Charles weds Emma after treating her father. At first all goes well as the couple set up house in a French provincial town where little exciting ever occurs. They have a daughter Berthe with whom Emma has little to do. She never grows up to becoming a mature woman.
Emma carries on two affairs in the novel with the law student Leon and the wealthy but callous womanizing aristocrat Rodolphe. She is sucked into a cesspool of overwhelming debt being addicted to clothing, jewelry and furniture. Emma's lovers forsake her as her disillusionment with men and life itelf takes over life. Madame Bovary ends her life by committing suicide. The account of her horrific, painful and grotesque death from her fatal injection of arsenic rat poison will never be forgotten by the
reader. Despite her many sins she deserves pity at such a sad end. Her husband dies a few years later and her daughter has to be farmed out to a relative.
What makes this novel of adultery, satirical views of provincial life, mockery of the relgious hypocrisy in the French countryside and lacerating portraits of such types as the village atheist Homais so great? In my opinion the reasons this is such a landmark work must include:
a. A picture of a woman seeking to break out of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie view of females as placid wives and mothers with no aspirations of their own. Throughout the novel there are images of birds seeking freedom from cages. Emma is a modern feminist in the nineteenth century society she finds impossible to escape. Emma is an iconoclastic rebel.
b. A satirical and cynical view of human hypocrisy drawn with skill in the pictures Flaubert draws of such figures as the village priest, scientist, merchants and moneylenders. Society is concerned with money and social status to the detriment of more spiritual and ethical values.
c. Flaubert introduces a new realism to the novel which will influence such naturalist as Emile Zola and others. The novel reads as if it was written today instead of over 150 years ago.
d. Flaubert's descriptions of the beauty of nature (and its indifference to human suffering and troubles) are beautifully etched. His use of language and the level of suspense he maintains throughout the work are excellent.
e. Flaubert is not afraid to describe female sexual longings. His sex scenes are tasteful to our eyes but viewed as prurient reading in his own day.
Penguin editons are always a joy to read with their critical apparatus and excellent introductions. Enjoy this great work of literature as soon as you can!

MADAME BOVARY is one of those books that I admire more than love. As fiction it is flawlessly written, and it's scathing viewpoint on French provincial society is delivered with style and aplomb. Flaubert's biting ironic take on the Romantic tradition has perhaps never been surpassed. You can rightly call MADAME BOVARY the great anti-romance of literature. The problem I have with it lies in it's failure to touch me on any emotional level. Neither Emma, nor any of the male characters in Yonville create empathy with me. Charles, who is the least repulsive male, is far more to be pitied than admired. I really couldn't understand or relate much to anyone in this novel.

Comparing Emma Bovary to that other eponymous lady, Anna Karenina, I found Tolstoy's cuckolding wife to be a much more sympathetic character. Part of that lies in the fact that Anna's husband is a less sympathetic character than Emma's, but the greater reason is that Anna thinks and feels in a wounded, yet logical fashion. She struggles to come to terms with her life's choices, whereas Emma seems more a willing victim of her own addictive personality. There isn't the depth to the characters in Flaubert's novel, and though I acknowledge it to be a masterpiece, it is more a cold, stylistic exercise in ironic realism, than a book that enlightens, exhilarates, or moves the reader.

That said, MADAME BOVARY is an essential book, and it certainly has influenced much literature that came after. Flaubert once famously remarked, "Emma Bovary, c'est moi". In her doomed search for beauty in an ugly world, she is an apt surrogate for the creative artist who lives to fashion the sublime from the dross.

I recently asked my English professor from University for a list of the 10 classics she considered a "must read". This novel, "Madame Bovary", was one of them.

I greatly enjoyed Flaubert's beautiful, beautiful prose. Not one word is out of place. Amazing. What a treasure! That this book was written 150 years ago is hard to imagine. If you change horses for cars, you wouldn't know.

"Madame Bovary" is a timeless novel. The characters are few, and they are all very well developed. In fact, it is not possible to not genuinely care for each individual in the story. Well everyone, except for the loan shark.

The protagonist, Emma, married very young to Charles Bovary, a doctor who once treated her father when he was ill. She never really loved her husband, but was bored and wanted to get away from home. Emma is pretty much a sweet, spoiled and bored housewife. On the other side, Charles is a lovely husband who does not know what good to do for her - he completely adores her. To compensate for being bored - Emma undertake almost daily shopping sprees. Buying all sorts of luxurious fabric for clothes, fancy china, furniture - you name it. Although her husband is a doctor, and is making decent money, she is spending well over their means. Behind Charles' back Emma signs promise-note after promise-note (the credit card of the 17th century). After a while, the shopping is not enough to keep her happy, and she is seeking excitement outside her marriage. She is having several affairs. In the beginning all well covered up, but after a while Emma is taking more and more chances, and is getting reckless. Of course, this cannot go on forever, Emma's "card house" is doomed to fall apart. Which it does, with a truly tragic ending..

I read the book in 50 page gulps at the time, and I found it so hard to put away. I truly enjoyed every page! A great read and a true classic!

Flaubert would have appreciated the large group of American readers who seem to think it is only a book about adultery; he has duped them. You've fallen for it, people, focusing on titillation again in the grand American tradition. The book is a critique of middle-class consumption as a means of cultural formation, of which adultery is only one result. With your credit card debts, sport utility vehicles and blind allegiance to leaders (as long as the stock market is rising) you possess precisely the values Flaubert implicitly critiques throughout the novel. No one seems willing to discuss Homais and his half-baked status-seeking, either. The tired rituals of bourgeous love are played out nightly on American TV; Flaubert saw it in more subtle tones 150 years ago. A masterpiece.

I have to disagree with those who say that the Penguin version isn't a thoroughly readable translation. I found it not only readable, but , overall enthralling, with language that captured the very spirit of Flaubert, that I was hard-pressed to put it down. I never truly expected to like Madame Bovary--it is the epitome of the romantic's life: the seeking and never finding of the ideal passion and fervor that is so amply described in the romance novels, not only of emma's time, but ours as well. I thought that I would find Emma too much; too idealic, too fantastical. Instead I found a woman who, in the thoughts she expresses, was able to truly define the essence of the disappointment one can feel with real life. It is in this, that i found one of my favorite books of all time. One may think that Emma is immoral, that her actions are selfish, and never justified. However, one could also say that Emma is living in the fantasy created by her novels, ones that she has fashioned to be epitomes of real life. It is a sad state that emma is in, with, in her mind, ideal portrayals of what she believes the world ought to be, but it is also one that is wholly relatable to this humble reader.

If you haven't read it, add it to your pile. Move it to the top. And whenever you finally read the last word that Flaubert has so meticulously chosen for his novel, you can see the genius that created Emma in all her glory, and you, too, will understand the wonders of this book.

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."

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."

Beyond its deservedly much-praised stylistic and structural perfection, the power of Gustave Flaubert's spectacular novel "Madame Bovary" comes from the fact that it addresses head-on one of the fundamental issues of human existence: the mechanisms humans invent for themselves to meet their own emotional needs. Romantic love is presented here as such a mechanism invented to help satisfy the human urge for sex in a non-commercial setting, in other words without direct cash payment, as for instance in prostitution.

Indeed, to survive, a man --- let me start with a man and not with Emma Bovary herself --- needs to eat, he needs to have a roof over his head and as of the onset of puberty he has to have his sexual needs attended to. To eat, man can shop for food, that's what the grocer is for. The home he needs can also be purchased, not from the grocer but from the builder and the decorator. When it comes to the sex, that too is freely available for purchase in any society, whether or not it is run by the bourgeoisie. In this case the purchase is made neither from the grocer, nor from the builder or the decorator, but from the prostitute. Remarkably, before meeting her, both Emma Bovary's lovers, had met their sexual needs in this commercial setting. We see Rodolphe Boulanger, even before becoming Emma's first lover, cynically calculating how he is going to get rid of her, once he will have had enough. After all, that is the only detail that strikes him as different from what transpires in a sexual transaction with a prostitute whom he can quit without any discussion as soon as he has paid up. He wants to connect with Emma not to save himself some money, he is well-to-do after all, but to "experience" non-commercial sex. Of course, unlike a prostitute, you do not pay an adulteress in cash. Another form of payment is extracted. The price is a pretense of love, of romantic love like in novels. Yes, Emma Bovary has read many a romantic novel in her time and knows all-too-well what to expect in matters of such romantic love. It is spectacular to watch how Emma and both her lovers play this romantic love game and in moments of sexual abandon are able to completely suspend disbelief. Flaubert is reducing romantic love to a currency, not unlike the cash that buys life's other necessities.

To Emma, a woman, love is something else altogether, something learned from novels. In this respect she drives Flaubert to one of the main issues of western civilization's novel, the effect of romantic novels on naïve readers. This issue had been forcefully raised already by Miguel de Cervantes, the inventor of the modern western novel. After all, his Don Quixote de la Mancha, is also an avid reader of romantic novels, and the lessons he draws from this reading set him up for fighting windmills, and asexually revering Dulcinea, a feminine creation of his own imagination. Emma Bovary, reads not the Spanish trash available to the Knight of the Mournful Countenance, but Sir Walter Scott and his like. Her second love affair is jump-started at a performance of Gaetano Donizetti's operatic setting of Sir Walter's "The Bride of Lammermoor." Whereas Cervantes pokes fun at the romantic novel, Flaubert explores what appear to be its outright tragic consequences. In this sense "Madame Bovary" is about the role of literature in everyday life.

But at a closer look, this role of literature is not as tragic by far as it first appears. After all, when dumped by Rodolphe Boulanger, her first lover, Emma Bovary gets herself a second lover Léon Dupuis, and could probably get herself a third lover once the affair with Léon runs its course. She is done in not by matters of love, but by the cavalier manner in which she handles her own and her husband's finances. It is her dealings with the unscrupulous merchant Lheureux that bring about her downfall. Lheureux couldn't care less about love, he is a strictly cash-and-carry fellow. In his own way, he tries to help Emma, to bring her to her senses. He sends her to the notary Guillaumin, who for a change offers to pay for her sexual services with money rather than with professions of romantic love. This prompts a revolted Emma's famous line, "Sir, you shamelessly take advantage of my distress. I am to be pitied, but I am not for sale." Spoken like a reader of Sir Walter Scott. Emma Bovary's willingness to find the sweet nothings whispered in her ear by Rodolphe and Léon as the only currency in which to accept payment for her sexual services, is tantamount to Don Quixote's willingness to fight the windmills.

So, in the end, Madame Bovary is as much about the role of literature in our lives, as about adultery or bourgeois philistinism, its most obvious themes. Lest one walk away with a bad feeling where matters literary are concerned, Flaubert spikes his text with his remarkable insights into the nature of great literature. Consider a paragraph in part II, Chapter 12, which starts as an astute examination of Rodolphe's jaded reaction to Emma's romantic chit-chat, and then smoothly meanders into as good a statement of the basic problem faced by a writer, as has ever been put in words by anyone "Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing bears, while aiming to move the stars to tears." Never mind the bears, Flaubert shoots for the stars and is right on target.