Madame Bovary (1856) is Gustave Flaubert's first published novel and is considered his masterpiece. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel's true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. Flaubert was notoriously a perfectionist about his writing and claimed always to be searching for le mot juste ("the right word").
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Madame Bovary (1856) is Gustave Flaubert's first published novel and is considered his masterpiece. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel's true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. Flaubert was notoriously a perfectionist about his writing and claimed always to be searching for le mot juste ("the right word").
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Dispatched, from the UK, within 48 hours of ordering. This book is in good condition but will show signs of previous ownership. Please expect some creasing to the spine and/or minor damage to the cover. Aged book. Tanned pages and age spots, however, this will not interfere with reading.
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Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary is fully deserving of its canonical status. The portrait of Emma Bovary, whose extravagant passions and dreams that cannot be contained by a dull marriage, result in adulterous affairs, debt, and suicide, is unforgettable. The reader is absolutely persuaded of her fullness of character; indeed, this is woman as seductress in part, but she can hardly be regarded as a type. If anything, her husband Charles, adoring, long-suffering, and deluded, might be more archetypal. Leslie Fiedler has observed that while Flaubert wrote of adult male-female relationships in the 1850s, American male novelists wrote gothic "boy's books" almost in evasion of those same themes. In Flaubert's novel, there is a knowingness about marriage, sexuality, the bourgeoisie and its values, obsession, deception, and death, even a prefiguring of black comedy and the grotesque in the eyeless beggar whose song ironically foretells Emma Bovary's demise.