Name: Madame Bovary
Rating: 3.576236263736264 (364 reviews)
ISBN: 9781603841245

Gustave Flaubert

Raymond N. MacKenzie

In his Introduction, MacKenzie discusses Flaubert's life, the writing of Madame Bovary, the world in which the novel is set, and its publication and reception. Footnotes, a bibliography, and a chronology are also provided.

Provincial Lives

Madame Bovary

One of the acknowledged masterpieces of 19th century realism, Madame Bovary is revered by writers and readers around the world, a mandatory stop on any pilgrimage through modern literature. Flaubert's legendary style, his intense care over the selection of words and the shaping of sentences, his unmatched ability to convey a mental world through the careful selection of telling details, shine on every page of this marvelous work. Now the award-winning translator Margaret Mauldon has produced a modern translation of this classic novel, one that perfectly captures the tone that makes Flaubert's style so distinct and admired. Madame Bovary scandalized its readers when it was first published in 1857. And the story itself remains as fresh today as when it was first written, a work that remains unsurpassed in its unveiling of character and society. It tells the tragic story of the romantic but empty-headed Emma Rouault. When Emma marries Charles Bovary, she imagines she will pass into the life of luxury and passion that she reads about in sentimental novels and women's magazines. But Charles is an ordinary country doctor, and provincial life is very different from the romantic excitement for which she yearns. In her quest to realize her dreams she takes a lover, Rodolphe, and begins a devastating spiral into deceit and despair. And Flaubert captures every step of this catastrophe with sharp-eyed detail and a wonderfully subtle understanding of human emotions. Malcolm Bowie, a leading authority on French literature, explores Flaubert's genius in his masterly introduction to this must-have book for all lovers of great literature.

Provincial Manners

Ela, porém, tinha a vida fria de um celeiro aberto para o norte; e o tédio, aranha silenciosa, ia tecendo a sua teia na sombra de todos os cantos do seu coração. 🕸️🕷️

Iza Lemos

need more time for my thoughts to percolate. i want to detest and hate emma for her choices but i still find the humanity as much as the ugliness in her desires. 

Madam Bovary

reminded me Ana karnina but in French version and more more romantic and exaggerated.

Shidehdeishidi

a story of provincial life

Flaubert. sagittarius, libéral enragé, bisexual

Lydia Davis. translator, spunky polyglot, works to include the definitive rendering of Swann’s Way

synopsis. small town beauty marries a physician of ordinary ability. begins a life of adultery and extravagance leveraged on his honest work. surrenders when the bank comes for her designer wardrobe

offers. forbidden love and hedonism spun French and erudite; names like “Hippolyte”

title. eponymous but could have as easily been “Lust and Consumerism” if styled as some its contemporaries

Jacob Kotlier

Madame Bovary

Flaubert. sagittarius, libéral enragé, bisexual

Lydia Davis. translator, spunky polyglot, works to include the definitive rendering of Swann’s Way

synopsis. small town beauty marries a physician of ordinary ability. begins a life of adultery and extravagance leveraged on his honest work. surrenders when the bank comes for her designer wardrobe

offers. forbidden love and hedonism spun French and erudite; names like “Hippolyte”

title. eponymous but could have as easily been “Lust and Consumerism” if styled as some its contemporaries

rating. 8.1/10

Pierre

So much Normandy :)
Took me a while to get into. The vocabulary is thick. The characters are exquisite.

A powerful nineteenth-century French classic depicting the moral degeneration of a weak-willed woman

Sarah Sammis

A classic I actually did enjoy in that book to film class.

The writing style was not always my favorite; the story dragged at times. But the narrative and Emma’s character were truly fascinating.

Bethany Jenkins

Read for book club.

The writing style was not always my favorite; the story dragged at times. But the narrative and Emma’s character were truly fascinating.

mic shulman

rip emma bovary you would’ve loved gwen stefanis ‘if i were a rich girl’

Virginia L

Ho rimuginato un po' sulla figura di Emma, specialmente sul come definirla. Il modo più sintetico ed esplicativo che abbia trovato si concretizza nell'idea del personaggio più cattivo che mi sia capitato sotto gli occhi. Cattivo, guasto, lontano da ogni mia personale aspirazione. Emma riassume i peggiori comportamenti femminili. Fantasia e sensibilità potrebbero emergere, se non venissero degenerate da questo personaggio avvilente e volubile. 
Intanto ho letto Madame Bovary proprio perché ho letto di Madame Bovary! In ogni dove, citata ovunque: mentre restavo totalmente estranea a Flaubert e del tutto ignara di cosa trattasse questo libro. 
La cosa più bella che ho potuto trarre è che un personaggio così fortemente delineato possa essere letto in maniera diversa col passare del tempo. Per me, donna degli anni duemila, Emma è quasi un esempio offensivo. E' l'idea di donna che personalmente voglio combattere e superare. Eppure fino a qualche tempo fa la nostra Madame doveva costituire l'esempio esuberante di una femminilità forte, una donna che asseconda le fantasie e le passioni per essere felice (e non rimanere a casa a fare la calza). Allora sì che noi oggi potremmo dire di essere Madame Bovary.

Offers a new translation of Flaubert's classic tale, in which the title character turns to spending and a series of affairs to combat the boredom of married life and, heartbroken and crippled by debts, takes drastic action that results in tragedy.

provincial ways

Andrew John Kinney

This is my third outing with Madame Bovary, the first being aborted somewhere around the halfway mark, the second being a reading without sufficient understanding. This time, I read Lydia Davis' wonderful translation, and I prepared by reading Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot, and also by reading the short novel A Simple Heart by Flaubert in order to better accommodate myself to his style. Although Flaubert would have hated this, I found it useful to understand, via Barnes, his attitude toward the people he wrote about, the French bourgeoisie in the reign of Louis Philippe. But more on that later.

Madame Bovary is a bit like Moby-Dick, in that there is a surface-level story that is straightforward; a feckless young bride becomes disillusioned with her provincial life and embarks on affairs and unsustainable spending in the pursuit of happiness. And, through her gullible nature, romantic illusions, and lack of self-awareness, it ends badly for her. But there is so much more than that in the book, and if one spends the time to understand, the reader sees the many varieties of human nature revealed by Flaubert; it should be noted that there are almost no sympathetic characters in the book, except maybe Pere Roualt, Emma's father. Also, Flaubert interleaves conversations in such a way as to be very funny, if you're paying attention. The delicate conversation between Emma and her lover-to-be, Rodolphe, while sitting in a mezzanine overlooking the county fair is an example; Rodolphe presses his case with Emma telling flattering her lie after flattering lie, while the prize for best manure is being awarded in the background.

It is said that Flaubert came to love his characters so much that as he wrote his ending, he was constantly in tears at the disaster he had invented for them. Whether true or not, this is emblematic of his attitude toward all these flawed characters; he looked on them as a benign, god-like observer who readily understood their failings, but felt sympathy toward their very human existences. He knew their flaws, their lies, their pedantry, and yet he had an affection for them all (well, perhaps not Lheureux), and he paints a believable picture of each of them as people caught up in the societal norms of their world. Flaubert saw the customs of his time with a clear eye, and he laughed at himself, as well as others, for following pointless rituals, and spending money on meaningless trifles or ornamentation. He is said to have laughed out loud at himself in front of the mirror once, while preparing to shave, saying that surely the risk of dying from tetanus was worth conforming to society's tonsorial expectations.

If you care to seek it out, there is ample symbolism in the book, like the blind beggar, but it is an enjoyable read even without thinking deeply about these meanings that Flaubert labored so hard to work into the story. Thanks again to Lori for encouraging me to read it again, in a better translation! And I would encourage prospective readers of Flaubert to read Julian Barnes' book (Flaubert's Parrot) which is a novel, but really tells much of Flaubert's personality and history, before reading Bovary, and also to read Nabokov's essay on the book, which explains much of the symbolic objects and characters Flaubert put into his novel. Flaubert said that the author should be like God, present everywhere but visible nowhere, and he truly disliked the idea of reading about an author to try to understand his work. But in his case, I do think the reader benefits from understanding him, and also, Flaubert is just an extremely interesting man, so the effort to understand him does not go unrewarded. 

Madame Bovary is a masterpiece; it is the work of a genius and is worth the attention is has received.

cher elle

charisa

me reading a french man? not another asian-american woman??

it's been a hot second since i've read anything vaguely labeled european lit. i'm not even really sure why i picked this one up, but i found flaubert's writing strangely magnetic. though the book is framed as a series of tragedies, the writing itself was pretty lighthearted and humorous, nearly satirical. 

truly, every character was insufferable in their own special way! emma was especially frustrating in her immense discontentment and romantic fantasies... which i guess made her an interesting foil to the larger bourgeois. we love a totally unself-aware protagonist.

Aylén Abril Costantini 

Enhorabuenaaaaa, al fin termino esta re lectura que me tomó bastante tiempo porque me subrayé todo. Te amo Emma gracias Flaubert. Que tragedia.

serena maeve.

This book was not entirely my cup of tea, but it's well-written and intriguing. Also, I adored Leon's character very much.

Sarah Escorsa

J'ai toujours trouvé le personnage d'Emma Bovary totalement insupportable et n'ai jamais aimé ce roman de Flaubert...

jiaqi kang

** spoiler alert **
           (read in french) so obviously this is completely beautiful but GOD does it punish emma for just having the human desire for self-actualisation, for being a woman basically.... especially her death - i obviously knew she was gonna kill herself but i thought she'd die really quietly. the way she dies is just so pathetic, are you really gonna do that to her too? 

like yeah, emma sucks, but also: 

https://images.app.goo.gl/1H4qSy9Fosi... emma is mona lisa saperstein, i am her dad

Madame Bovary Provincial Lives

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