Madame Bovary, originally published as Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners (French: Madame Bovary), is the debut novel of French writer Gustave Flaubert, published in 1856. The eponymous character lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. When the novel was first serialized in Revue de Paris between 1 October 1856 and 15 December 1856, public prosecutors attacked the novel for obscenity. The resulting trial in January 1857 made the story notorious. After Flaubert's ...
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Madame Bovary, originally published as Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners (French: Madame Bovary), is the debut novel of French writer Gustave Flaubert, published in 1856. The eponymous character lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. When the novel was first serialized in Revue de Paris between 1 October 1856 and 15 December 1856, public prosecutors attacked the novel for obscenity. The resulting trial in January 1857 made the story notorious. After Flaubert's acquittal on 7 February 1857, Madame Bovary became a bestseller in April 1857 when it was published in two volumes. A seminal work of literary realism, the novel is now considered Flaubert's masterpiece, and one of the most influential literary works in history. The British critic James Wood writes: "Flaubert established, for good or ill, what most readers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible." Long established as one of the greatest novels, the book has been described as a "perfect" work of fiction. Henry James wrote: "Madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone: it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment." Marcel Proust praised the "grammatical purity" of Flaubert's style, while Vladimir Nabokov said that "stylistically it is prose doing what poetry is supposed to do". Similarly, in his preface to his novel The Joke, Milan Kundera wrote, "not until the work of Flaubert did prose lose the stigma of aesthetic inferiority. Ever since Madame Bovary, the art of the novel has been considered equal to the art of poetry." Giorgio de Chirico said that in his opinion "from the narrative point of view, the most perfect book is Madame Bovary by Flaubert". Julian Barnes called it the best novel that's ever been written. The novel exemplifies the tendency of realism, over the course of the nineteenth century, to become increasingly psychological, concerned with the accurate representation of thoughts and emotions rather than of external things. In this way it precedes the French novelist Marcel Proust and the twentieth-century apotheosis James Joyce. (wikipedia.org)
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Unfortunately it was in French..did I miss that in the entry?? That was why I only gave it a 2.
Service was excellent for delivery.
WilliamS
Feb 18, 2009
Unsympathetic antiheroine
This is one case in which the chief character does not change at the end of the novel. Though I cannot argue about Flaubert's prose, since I have not read Bovary in French, I will say that this is one of the few novels I've read which I would not read a second time. Emma seems completely selfish and ungrateful, even when people try to hep her. I only give it three stars because of its honorable place in the canon of great literature. To each his own, I guess.
bevans605
Jul 22, 2008
An Interesting Character Study
Flaubert's writing in Madame Bovary, as has been mentioned before, is slightly dry, but in my opinion it is the ideas that the novel conveys that make it so powerful. While many of us feel from time to time that our lives lack a certain excitement, Emma Bovary's thoughts are dominated by her overwhelming boredom with her husband and marriage throughout her life. I found her to be a slightly pitiable character in the beginning, but quickly her bratty nature lost much sympathy that I had for her. Nevertheless, Emma Bovary is an interesting character to study, especially due to her skewed system of values in which something is only as good as the emotional, passionate response it can evoke in her. Flaubert does paint some vivid images, most notably Emma's vision of God as she recieves Communion, but seems more concerned with painting the drabness of her life. Overall, I enjoyed Madame Bovary, but I had gotten the picture halfway through.
Ellyb
Mar 11, 2008
It has its ups and downs
Hmm, a great part of me agrees with the previous review. I struggled to maintain interest in the life of Emma Bovary, who seemed so vapid, so selfish, and so primitive. The prose is extremely dry (that may depend on the translation) and one sighs in annoyance over the cluelessness of her husband. However, at the core of it, Madame Bovary is about the desperate struggle to feel something besides boredom. Emma is trapped by convention and instead of laying back, resigned, she fights. Sure, she fights stupidly and selfishly, but her yearning for happiness resonates with a ring of truth and aroused a measure of empathy in me despite my misgivings. *Mild Spoiler alert* The tragedy of the story is that it is her act of self violence that results in the greatest height of emotion and greatest level of passion that Emma ever gets to know.
Renee
May 9, 2007
Madame Bovary is Flaubert?s story of a woman seeking love and interest outside her marriage. She continues in her illusion that she will find something better the next time around and simply falls into greater unhappiness and boredom. This book has nothing redemptive about it; no character is happy, there is no beauty in any of their relationships, and one becomes saturated with Madame Bovary?s boredom reading it.
