This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.
In "Madame Bovary," his story of a shallow, deluded, unfaithful, but consistently compelling woman living in the provinces of nineteenth-century France, Gustave Flaubert invented not only the modern novel but also a modern attitude toward human character and human experience that remains with us to this day. One of the rare works of art that it would be fair to call perfect, "Madame Bovary" has had an incal-culable influence on the literary culture that followed it. This translation, by Francis Steeg-muller, is acknowledged by common consensus as the definitive English rendition of Flaubert's text.… (more)
Limelite: Essentially the same greedy, social climbing woman who gets herself into money troubles and manipulates men to get out of them -- but with more success. Similar commentary on society, but instead of the bourgeoisie of village France it's the upper crust of NYC of nearly the same time but without the trenchant humor of Flaubert.… (more)
DLSmithies: Don Quixote was Flaubert's favourite book, and I've read somewhere that the idea of Madame Bovary is to re-tell the story of Don Quixote in a different context. Don Quixote is obsessed with chivalric literature, and immerses himself in it to the extent that he loses his grip on reality. Emma Bovary is bewitched by Romantic literature in the same way. There are lots of parallels between the two novels, and I think putting them side by side can lead to a better understanding of both.… (more)
browner56: The stories of two women, separated by 150 years, who search desperately for something they never find. Flaubert's legendary protaganist is the role model for Vargas Llosa's "bad girl".
Lapsus_Linguae: Both heroines love novels and wish to lead an adventurous life but instead, they both get married to down-to-earth medical men who, despite a sincere affection, never understand them.
soylentgreen23: 'Mrs Craddock' evidently shares a lot in common with Flaubert's masterpiece, especially in terms of its representation of a woman married to a dull man, who wishes to have a renewed taste of passion, despite the likely terrible consequences.
SPOILERS AHEAD: The Lydia Davis translation is the second I have ever read and, if memory serves me correctly, it is superior; it is gorgeously written. Is it a product of my having grown older since my first experience with this novel or is Emma objectively insufferable? Whether or not she would be diagnosed manic depressive, I leave to someone else to decide, but she strikes me as simultaneously vicious and imbecilic, in the way a small child is by nature of its inability to reason or control its passions. Charles, meanwhile, is Moliere's Pierrot -- the pitiable cuckold. Certainly, the novel is a masterpiece of realism, most strikingly in the vividly grotesque descriptions of Emma's protracted death. And while some readers cringe at the apparent moral ambiguity of the narrative voice, I find Flaubert (in this translation at least) even-handed in his treatment of the material: his articulation of Emma's worldview is demonstrably not a justification of it. ( )
What could I possibly say about Madame Bovary that hasn't been said? It's a classic. As the preface of my edition puts it, it's the 'first sex and shopping novel.'
Gustave takes his time pulling you into the story, but by 150 pages in things are zinging right along. His writing is wonderful throughout the book, but you don't really come to appreciate it until you're fully invested in the characters.
One point of caution: I found the story to be almost 'ho-hum' at certain points. There are too many Emma Bovary's in our culture, now: Carmella Soprano, Betty Friedan, the desperate housewives, that one woman in that movie you saw. But I'm glad I didn't stop! It's worth it to read to the end, to watch the tragedy unfold in such exquisite detail.
But this is perhaps the reason to read the book: it's a blueprint. You read it, and it takes you back to another century, when things were supposedly simpler, and you discover characters experiencing the same human elations and sufferings that we experience today.
There was no 'simpler time.' People are the same everywhere, and always have been. ( )
Madame Bovary is many things - a perfect piece of fictional machinery, the pinnacle of realism, the slaughterer of romanticism, a complete study of failure - but it is also the first great shopping-and-fucking novel.
To Marie-Antoine-Jules Sénard Member of the Paris Bar Ex-President of the National Assemly Former Minister of the Interior
To Louis Bouilhet
First words
We were in study hall when the headmaster walked in, followed by a new boy not wearing a school uniform, and by a janitor carrying a large desk.
We were at prep, when the Head came in, followed by a new boy not in uniform and a school-servant carrying a big desk.
We were at prep when the Headmaster came in, followed by a 'new boy' not wearing school uniform, and by a school servant carrying a large desk.
We were in class when the head master came in, followed by a "new fellow," not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk.
We were in the prep.-room when the Head came in, followed by a new boy if "mufti" and a beadle carrying a big desk.
Quotations
What would they be doing now? ... the sort of life that opens the heart and the senses like flowers in bloom. Whereas for her, life was cold as an attic facing north, and the silent spider boredom wove its web in all the shadowed corners of her heart.
Surprised by the strange sweetness of it, they never though to describe or to explain what they felt. Coming delights, like tropical beaches, send out their native enchantment over the vast spaces that precede them – a perfumed breeze that lulls and drugs you out of all anxiety as to what may yet await you below the horizon.
'Have you got your pistols?' 'What for?' 'Why, to defend yourself,' Emma replied. 'From your husband? Ha! Poor little man!'
Gone were those tender words that had moved her to tears, those tempestuous embraces that had sent her frantic. The grand passion into which she had plunged seemed to be dwindling around her like a river sinking into its bed; she saw the slime at the bottom.
She repented her past virtue as though it were a crime; what still remained of it collapsed beneath the savage onslaught of her pride.
In "Madame Bovary," his story of a shallow, deluded, unfaithful, but consistently compelling woman living in the provinces of nineteenth-century France, Gustave Flaubert invented not only the modern novel but also a modern attitude toward human character and human experience that remains with us to this day. One of the rare works of art that it would be fair to call perfect, "Madame Bovary" has had an incal-culable influence on the literary culture that followed it. This translation, by Francis Steeg-muller, is acknowledged by common consensus as the definitive English rendition of Flaubert's text.
▾Library descriptions
No library descriptions found.
▾LibraryThing members' description
Book description
"Madame Bovary", apparso a puntate sulla "Revue de Paris" nel 1856 e integralmente un anno dopo, incontrò subito un grande successo di pubblico - dovuto anche al clamore del processo a cui il suo autore, incriminato per oltraggio alla morale e alla religione, fu sottoposto -, imponendosi all'attenzione della critica come il capolavoro assoluto del romanzo moderno. Incentrato sulla superba figura di Emma Bovary - donna inquieta, insoddisfatta, simbolo di un'insanabile frustrazione sentimentale e sociale - e giocato su un antiromanticismo ideologico e formale di fondo, "Madame Bovary" come ha scritto Vladimir Nabokov, "dal punto di vista stilistico è prosa che fa ciò che si suppone faccia la poesia. Senza Flaubert non ci sarebbe stato un Marcel Proust in Francia, né un James Joyce in Irlanda. In Russia, Cechov non sarebbe stato Cechov". (piopas)
archivomorero | May 21, 2023 | 
)
)
Google Books — Loading...
Madame Bovary- Bowie's top 100 Group Read
Wikipedia in English (4)
16
