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Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary
Audiobook11 hours

Madame Bovary

Written by Gustave Flaubert

Narrated by Donada Peters

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

About this audiobook

One of the acknowledged masterpieces of nineteenth-century realism, Madame Bovary is revered by writers and readers around the world, a mandatory stop on any pilgrimage through modern literature. Gustave Flaubert's legendary style, his intense care over the selection of words and the shaping of sentences, and his unmatched ability to convey a mental world through the careful selection of telling details shine throughout this marvelous work.

Madame Bovary scandalized audiences 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.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 26, 2009
ISBN9781400179046
Author

Gustave Flaubert

«Yo celebro que Emma Bovary ?ha escrito Vargas Llosa? en vez de sofocar sus sentidos tratara de colmarlos, que no tuviera escrúpulo en confundir el cul y el coeur, que, de hecho, son parientes cercanos, y que fuera capaz de creer que la luna existía para alumbrar su alcoba.»No han dejado de correr ríos de tinta en torno a La señora Bovary, que hoy presentamos en una nueva traducción de María Teresa Gallego Urrutia. Defendida en su día por Baudelaire y Sainte-Beuve, reivindicada por Zola y el naturalismo, rescatada por Sartre y los autores del nouveau roman, admirada por Nabókov, es aún hoy un modelo central de lo que debe y no debe ser una novela. La historia de un adulterio en una ciudad de provincias, sin grandes personajes ni ambientes fastuosos, tuvo un aspecto tan realista que las instituciones se vieron agredidas y abrieron un proceso judicial contra el autor, del que saldría absuelto y que le reportó una fama sin precedentes. Gustave Flaubert nació en Ruán en 1821. En 1843 empezó a escribir la primera versión de lo que luego sería La educación sentimental (Alba Clásica núm. liv). En 1851 inició la redacción de La señora Bovary, que se publicaría cinco años después, acarreándole un proceso judicial del que saldría absuelto. El proceso, sin embargo, aseguró el éxito del libro. Publicaría luego la novela histórica Salambó (1962), La educación sentimental (1869), La tentación de San Antonio (1874) y Tres cuentos (1877): los únicos textos, de las más de ocho mil páginas que escribió, que permitió, en su afán perfeccionista, que vieran la luz pública. Murió en 1880 en Canteleu.

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Reviews for Madame Bovary

Rating: 3.633986928104575 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    OH Gustave, you sure do know how to turn a sentence. Your words are flowery and descriptive. Still that darn Emma could never enjoy the happiness and good life she had and always had to keep searching for that "story-like" romance. Life is not like a romance novel, sorry, Emma.

    The only thing I did not like about this book was the 5 second wrap up at the end. Couldn't Gustave just wrote another book from Charles' point of view and tell us the story of what happened to poor little Berthe? That I would've liked better than the 5 second wrap up that gave me no ending...
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book was a cyncial summary of the French culture and classes of the time. Despite it being written long ago, the basic themes can still apply to our world today. Gustave Flaubert definantly had a jaded perspective and used extremity to illustrate his views. Madame Bovary is a twisted story, but is so interesting because it can also be relavent to modern times.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    What a selfish, charmless woman. There is nothing about her to recommend her.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The first two parts were the best. By the third part, I started to dislike Madame Bovary, which was probably the point, but I really wanted to like her, despite all her faults. Also, by the third part, I disliked all the other characters too, though some were so pitiful they were comical--too comical to truly dislike. The story as a whole was great but only because the details and the mindframe of the characters were evoked with such care. The language was so controlled, so modulated and well-crafted, even in translation. He doesn't just overwhelm you with description, he gives you just enough detail (but the right details) to make everything very immediate. He also zooms in and out, giving you very close-up details about the decorations for a page then zooming out to cover months in just a sentence or two. He really knows where to skip over and where to elaborate so that the story really pulled me along.I wanna read Sentimental Education next... or Lydia Davis's translation of Madame Bovary, when it comes out.*** SPOILERS BELOW ***I think it's a misconception to think of Bovary as a love-starved whore. What she really desires isn't the men she throws herself at, but the feeling of desire itself. She never loved these men, she loved what these men represented for her in her own mind. She has to choose between doomed-desire (since desire never satisfies and just produces more desire) or to see reality as it really was, which for her was depressing. All the men were pushovers, slimeballs, or opportunists. Emma needed a challenge, she was too smart for her own good. That said, she was also a selfish bitch. I can't believe she didn't think of her child.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Flaubert is such a good writer that his characters are appealing despite his intentions, which I think were to demonstrate the ultimate meaninglessness of their lives. (Not to mention his beautiful depictions of pastoral and small-town life.) But those intentions poison the plot, so that it becomes more of a chore than a joy to read about the heroine's ongoing degradation.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Summary: Emma Bovary is stuck in her provincial life. She is married to a successful but dull country doctor, and longs for the city, for the culture and refinement and romance that she does not find in her marriage nor in motherhood. She becomes infatuated with a young law student, but does not show her affections, trying to cling to the image of devoted wife. However, she then allows herself to be seduced by a wealthy man about town, and to run up huge debts trying to live the live she wants, only to find that reality still does not live up to her romantic fantasy. Review: I really, really did not care for this book. I don't know if it's a matter of the writing, or the translation, or the narration, or what, but it just did very little for me. I found the characters flat and unlikable - I felt sorry for Charles (Emma's husband), but that's about it. Emma herself bugged the heck out of me - I get that women in the 1800s didn't have many options, or really any control over their lives, but Emma just seemed so stubbornly flighty and selfish that I wanted to give her a solid kick to the shins. I also didn't really care for the writing itself (again, this may have been the translation more than the writing). The introduction talks about how meticulous Flaubert was, always in search of the perfect word, but in listening to it, I didn't get that at all. The book came across as incredibly wordy and meandering and unnecessarily descriptive of just about everything. I didn't understand the point of some of the lengthy narrative diversions, and even parts of the plot that were important (the whole scheme of buying and selling debt, for example) wasn't entirely clear. Maybe if I had read this in a literature class, or if I spent more time analyzing the structure of the narrative and the significance of some of the details, maybe then I'd have gotten more out of it. But reading it by myself from a character and story-centric point of view? I had a hard time with it, and was glad when it was over. 1.5 out of 5 stars.Recommendation: I don't want to dissuade people from reading the classics, but this one didn't do it for me. You can get much the same story with more compelling characters and in a much shorter package in Kate Chopin's The Awakening.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.Recently, I read a review of the new translation of Madame Bovary in the New York Times Book Review that suggested that no one could possibly sympathize with, or even like, Emma Bovary, probably one of the most famous characters in literature. The introduction to my copy of the novel intimates the same. But having recently read Madame Bovary, I am completely sympathetic with Emma, even if I don’t condone her actions.All of us, especially those of us who are heavy readers, probably go through a phase of life in which we fantasize an exciting, adventurous future for ourselves, when we are swept up by great passion and every moment trembles with meaning. But then we grow up and discover that life is largely mundane, and most of us make our peace with that and find other means of contentment. However, Emma Bovary couldn’t bring herself to do that. Her relentless attempts to live a storybook fantasy lead her first to the Church, then to adulterous love affairs, then to bankruptcy and, ultimately, self destruction.In many ways, Emma is a feminist figure. In 19th century France, the only choices for a woman of her class were the nunnery or marriage. Emma chose marriage, but when she became bored, she didn’t have the options that her male lovers did: to go to Paris or travel abroad or take another mistress. Perhaps if she had had more choices, she wouldn’t have destroyed herself and her family.It’s not men who seduce Emma, but the novels she reads that lead her to believe that her life could be a passionate one rather than the dreary, day-to-day routine of the small village where her husband is a doctor. If we condemn her for refusing to be satisfied with a mundane life over which she really has no ownership, how are we any different from anyone who has ever insisted that women stay in their place? Certainly, Emma makes terrible choices in her almost hysterical pursuit of something — anything — that can fulfill her. But we can’t fault her for pursuing that.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It was not what I expected but I still liked it very much. It is beautifully written and the characters are all well developed and interesting. I started out relating very much to Emma's restlessness and dreams of a more glamorous life but as the book went on, she behaved increasingly more selfish and the book ended very tragically.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Dear Emma, what were you thinking?! With Madame Bovary, Flaubert has the reader mocking the main character one minute, despising her the next and feeling sorry before long. Great read today, I can only imagine the shock effect back in the mid 1800s!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This savage character tears you apart as it drives herself to her ugly death. An astounding account of Emma Bovary's journey through her desires amongst beautifully painted characters to showcase the mortality of not just the woman, but all frailty of mankind.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Lost in the translation of time and culture? Okay, scandalous because of her affairs, but her abject financial sense was more problematic, to me. Were the two "sins" linked or equally representative of her poor judgement? and why the opening school room scene with Charles, if he's not even the main character? I don't think I got this one.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Just because a book is a classic, does not necessarily mean a good read. I'm guessing that most of this book's success can be attributed to the fact that it would have been very scandalous in it's day. No matter when something is written, it helps if at least ONE of the characters is sympathetic...and I honestly could not root for any of them, not even remotely.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    What the heck is the big deal about this book? I just wanted to shake Emma Bovary. Suck it up sister. No body made you marry your husband. Nobody made you run up all that debt. And why do I care about the agriculture "fair" and some of the other things that Flaubert dwelt on?
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    The story of Emma and Charles and her adulterous affair with Rudolphe. Although Emma's character is a bit flightly and exceedingly dramatic at times, the reader an relate to her everyday struggles of being married to an "ordinary" man and always wanting more. I think the translation of the book is important as the copy that I picked up did not flow as well as I believe it should have, but I am chalking that up entirely to the translation.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    somewhere a reviewer called it a 'buddhist morality tale on the futility of desire' which pretty much sums it up for me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was a good read, but I didn't like Madame Bovary, so it was kind of annoying. She seemed to have no good reason for being as messed up as she was. Flaubert failed to make me understand why she was so vapid, venal, and obsessed with romance and money. She seemed to have a sociopathic lack of compassion for others.However, I'm always happy to read a slow, story about people living before all the technology we have today spoiled everything. It was refreshing to have people calling on their neighbors because that was the only way to get in touch with them. I could have done with a little less brutal mistreatment of horses. People were constantly riding them to death in a hurry to get somewhere, a spurring them bloody and whipping them.I really hoped to come to understand MB and have her find happiness or growth in some way. She failed to be able to grow or change and ended by killing herself. Give her a Darwin Award for unsurvival of the unfit-est.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Because the back cover left little to be desired, basically, Madame Bovary focuses on a doctor’s wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the emptiness of provincial life.I have to say that, at first, I really liked Emma, the “heroine” of Madame Bovary. She married the first man to come around, and later realized her mistake. She’s obsessed with the idea of love, but is unable to realize how much her husband, Charles, loves her. And her need to maintain her lifestyle has her spending more than Charles earns, much like our society today.And I particularly enjoyed Flaubert’s prose, his entwining of commonplace details and with observations, and his interesting commentaries on religion. Flaubert’s dialogue is also much easier to understand than I expected, especially due to the time period the book was printed in.However, by the third, and final, part of Madame Bovary I came to hate Emma. Her romantic ideals remind of some of my teenaged friends and classmates’ ideas: absurd, unattainable, and downright clingy. She needs someone to love her and pay attention to her twenty-four hours a day, and the only person who comes close to doing so is her husband, whom she cannot stand. “As for Emma, she never tried to find out whether she was in love with him. Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening - a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping eery will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings.” {pg. 119}In addition, Flaubert’s writing style become boring, and I had to force myself to trudge through the last twenty pages until the conclusion, which captured my attention again.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Yes, I know this book is a classic. But boy, was it a depressing book--not at all what I wanted to be reading while backpacking! I only ended up reading it because it was one of the few non-German books in the hostel book exchange, and I found that I almost had to force myself to plow onwards. Yes, it was well-written, and yes, Flaubert did a very good job of creating characters that I could not bring myself to care about at all.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I hated this book when it was assigned to me my senior year of high school. Assuming I'd changed since then, I gave it another go. Turns out I had good sense as an 18-year-old. I'm putting it down after 170 unsatisfying pages.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Slap begin, met oninteressante Charles als hoofdfiguur. Pas vaart na ontmoeting met Emma. Geleidelijke opbouw van het thema van de door romantische idee?n tot waanzin gedreven vrouw. Nogal vrijmoedige acties voor die tijd. Prachtige stijl: het midden houdend tussen klinisch-realisme en romantische lyriek. Bitter einde, puur cynisme. Zeer grote roman, vooral door beeldkracht, minder door verhaal en visie.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    You never know exactly what you are going to get into when you read older classics – you know, the ones from the 18th and 19th centuries, the ones that everyone tells you should be read, the ones that everyone talks about as great but have never really read. As you go back into those olden times, you far too often find stilted grammar, outdated approaches, descriptions that no longer resonate. I won't give you examples but, I've run into them, you've run into them, we've all run into them – and then wanted to run away.Such is not the case with Madame Bovary. Maybe it is just the translation I read (and any book from another language requires the right translation), but I was instantly transported into this story. I quickly cared about the characters and was quite happy to go along with them on their lives.The plot, like so many others in classical literature, can be found anywhere. Suffice to say we follow the life of Madame Bovary (to be honest, the life of her husband – Charles). She is not happy with what life has given her (in spite of the constant efforts of her husband), and this only leads to her worsening her own situation.To be honest, it would be very easy to hate this book based on how dislikable Bovary is. Yet, the story is so compelling the reader watches it in the same fascination one saves for train wrecks.While some classical literature has made me squeamish at the thought of pursuing more, this book strengthens my resolve.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I had read this book some time in the distant past but when I saw the audiobook available on my library's electronic media site I thought it would be worth a listen. It was but it also bothered me a great deal. The tale is ultimately so tragic for Madame Bovary and her family and it seemed a high price to pay for essentially being an attractive woman. If you don't know the story it is pretty simple but beware spoilers follow. Emma Bovary is a lovely young woman who attracts the attention of a doctor. They marry but Emma is not happy in the small village they live in. So the doctor decides to move to a larger town where Emma attracts the attention of more men. Her first flirtation is quite innocent with the young clerk who lives across the street. However, he leaves to pursue legal studies in Paris and Emma is bereft. She has a child but perhaps due to post-partum depression doesn't seem to bond with the child. Then a wealthy landowner, Rodolphe, notices Emma and woos and wins her. They have a passionate affair and, in time, Emma begs him to run away with her. He agrees but has no intention of doing so. Emma orders clothes and travelling chests incurring quite a debt. When Rodolphe finally sends her a note breaking off their affair she becomes ill. The debts she incurred come due and she has no way of paying them. She goes to Rodolphe to get money from him but he tells her he does not have it. Emma gets arsenic from the chemist, swallows it and dies in agony. Her husband dies soon after, no doubt of a broken heart. The young daughter goes to a cousin who puts her to work in a cotton factory. Although the Bovarys are destroyed, nothing seems to happen to Rodolphe who is the cause of the tragedy really. If Flaubert's intention was to show what disparity existed (and possibly still exists) between men and women then he succeeded admirably.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Lydia Davis is magnificent: she is as precise as Flaubert was obsessive. I read this just for her, to see if I could understand more about Flaubert's claim that writing, and not plot, was all that mattered in "Madame Bovary."Flaubert's sense of what counts as ambitious writing -- his meticulous prose, where every sentence displays the work it took to make it, where each adjective is the only possible choice, and never hides its perfection as simple inspiration -- has hypertrophied into hyper-realism or atrophied into rote realism. He had a constant and deliberate sense of responsibility to mimesis, which gives the book an unremitting, pressurized attachment to what he considers as real life. His laborious search for the right word or image sometimes makes him perfunctory and mechanical, like the pharmacist Homais -- a parallel he seems not to have noticed at all (he enjoyed the character, so presumably he saw parts of himself in Homais, but there is no evidence he saw his own daily struggles for the perfect word as anything like Homais's grandiloquent misuses of language). The constant continuous attention to the perfect word, the dogged myopic search for the perfect image, the oppressive sense of the pages he discarded, creates a dull humming in my ears. It can't ever be realism again.And then of course there's the story. It's often said that Emma is a prototypical modern bourgeois woman, or even a prototype of contemporary experience, because she lives out of joint with her time (and because she never knows her desires). She has been said to be the prototype of many alienated, disaffected, emotionally unconnected characters, right up to Tom McCarthy's "Remainder." Contemporary readers admire Flaubert's capacity to despise so much of bourgeois life, and to write with such sarcasm ("irony" is the word Davis prefers in her introduction). But he doesn't despise everyone equally. The book is deeply sexist, for example. Emma notoriously ignores her daughter; but so does Flaubert. Emma famously fails to appreciate her husband, but Flaubert doesn't have anything very bad to say about him: he's almost as innocent and unformed as a child.But at least now I have a clearer sense of Flaubert's writing, and I can see enough of it to know it is not a model for the contemporary novel. It does not correspond clearly to any viable contemporary sense of realism, the reality effect, mimesis, or descriptive skill. The novel is sunk in history.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    When I was a senior in college, I took a Russian lit course in which Anna Karenina was the major text, and I devoured it.I felt a kind of empathy for Anna—and I loved her, too. Her haughtiness, her grandeur and her passion were somehow beautiful to me. My classmates, on the other hand, were very critical of her. They despised her for having an affair, for essentially abandoning her son — and indeed, these are terrible things even in the most forgiving circumstances. But I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Anna. I wondered—and I wonder still—what I would do in her circumstances (if I lived in 1870s Russia, that is). I wondered if my classmates scorned her because they, like me, saw something of themselves in her. (And don’t the most artfully crafted characters make us do that?)Occasionally Flaubert’s Madame Bovary came up during our class discussions. There are obvious parallels between the two (and if you don’t want to know, stop now, because here come the spoilers) — the unhappy marriages, the affairs, the heroines’ abandonment of their children, their suicides at the close of the book. At the time, though, I hadn’t read Madame Bovary. I was a little bit wary of it, knowing that I would approach it through a comparative lens. How would it measure up to my beloved Anna?Let me say this: in my (biased) opinion, it didn’t.That’s not to say I didn’t like it. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Emma Bovary was a compelling character—compelling in that I had no sympathy for her. I didn’t love her like I loved Anna. I thought her complaints about her husband were completely unfounded. He, a successful and intelligent doctor, loved her so much and was incredibly devoted and kind to her. Emma was simply determined to find him inadequate, ordinary and boring. She wanted the high life—living comfortably wasn’t enough. She wanted balls and fancy dinners and an endless wardrobe.True to my nature, though, I have to cut Emma a little slack. As a woman in mid-1800s France, she was powerless—and she knew it. She knew she had no options, no freedom, and very little control over her life. I think that, in a way, her obsession with her extra-marital affairs was a form of control. I’m not sure she was capable of loving any of those men—but she was capable of using them to feel as though she some power and influence.Emma was a tragic character, true, but an unlikeable one. Even her death was prolonged, dramatic and grotesque.I’d love to see what kind of lives Emma and Anna would create for themselves in the 21st century. I have a feeling they would thrive.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An emotional story about flawed humanity. Each of the characters in the book has their own flaws, which inevitably leads to a fitting disaster. Although I didn't like many of the characters (although Mr Bovary grew on me towards the end) and at times I felt like thowing the book across the room (which I would never do), the insight Flaubert shows into human nature makes this a beautiful work.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Madame Bovary was a slog and a bore. It is the ageless, timeless story of a woman who is seeking fulfillment in "love." She has romanticized love and will never be happy. Emma tries multiple affairs and spending large amounts of money to make her happy, but no cigar. This was scandalous when it came out in 1856 but would be mild today. Since the story line was blase I looked for great prose; but found little. 384 pages 2 1/2 stars
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I did not read this version I read a 'free' Public domain kindle book. It was a great version by Eleanor Marx-Aveling. You don't need to buy it, this version is great, but you will need a device to read it on!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    For a classic novel written by a man, about a fallen woman in European traditional society, this was a surprisingly readable book. There are a lot of topics embedded in the story that would be great for book club discussions and class papers, and the writing style is smooth enough that younger readers may not get too bogged down by the length of this novel.
    While I didn't particularly like Emma or any of the other characters in the story, they are well-rounded characters. Emma is a bit of the female equivalent of a playboy, constrained by society but still quite good at dodging responsibility and attracting extra-marital partners. Eventually her lifestyle catches up with her, as it does for many others, male and female, who approach their relationships and their lives the way Emma does, and rather than finally accepting responsibility publicly for her decisions, she takes poison, dying in a rather long, drawn out death scene as overdramatic as much of Emma's other adventures.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    One of my favourite literary heroines is Emma Woodhouse from Jane Austen's novel Emma. She is beautiful, rich and clever, but also lonely and bored. Without a close female companion of her own age, Emma relies on her own overactive imagination to entertain herself, and sets about matchmaking her friends and acquaintances, forcing improbable pairings and embarrassing everyone in the process. Only when she realises that the man of her own dreams has been right under her nose the whole time, does Emma stop inventing romances and settle down to her own happy ending. Emma Bovary, the eponymous heroine of Flaubert's novel, gets all of the above bass-ackwards. Her head filled with romantic stories, she dreams of meeting a passionate hero who will take her away from the oppressive countryside where she lives with her father, but instead she marries the first man who comes along and offers for her - Charles Bovary, a boring bourgeois country doctor. In love with the idea of being in love, Emma's romantic dreams are slowly suffocated when she realises how ordinary her life with Charles will be, so instead she seeks solace in shopping and having affairs with equally shallow men. Both distractions combine to destroy her. 'She merged into her own imaginings, playing a real part, realizing the long dream of her youth, seeing herself as one of those great lovers she had so long envied.'I didn't like Emma Bovary - although both Emmas have their faults, Austen's heroine also has some strength of character and independence of spirit. Flaubert's Emma is dependent on men to make her happy, but she is too superficial herself to notice that her lovers are only using her. In fact, I'm not sure she even cares! They are there to play a part in her romantic fantasies, and when they drop her, she starts looking for someone - or something - else to fill the void. Mme. Bovary isn't easy to care about - the original bored housewife, she is selfish, vain, materialistic and never content. Like Anna Karenina, I think we are meant to applaud that she breaks out of the confines of being a wife and mother, but unlike Tolstoy, Flaubert doesn't pity his heroine or demand the reader's sympathy, so I could put up with Emma's moping and mithering. In fact, all the characters are very believable in their faults and failings, especially poor unsuspecting Charles. Homais the chemist I could have done without, however. The only relevant part he plays in the whole novel is to supply the means to Emma's end.For a nineteenth century novel, Madame Bovary is still easy and enjoyable to read, with a dramatic - if rather Freudian - ending, and a cynical take on love and marriage.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Clearly the only way I can get myself to read one of the books in my continually growing to-be-read pile is for there to be a movie coming out. Get on it Hollywood, there are about 60 books I still need to get through.

    Disclaimers: I read a translation due to my French being nonexistent, but the original is supposed to be exquisite. I don't have to warn about spoilers in a review about something published in 1856, do I?

    Madame Bovary is one of those classics in which the elements that were once fresh and shocking are now cliched. Emma Bovary is unhappily married to a devoted but dull country doctor, Charles. Bored with her duties as a wife and mother, she fantasizes about a life full of romance and pleasure, similar to what she's read about in popular novels. Emma futilely chases these dreams by having love affairs and buying expensive items on credit. Both her lovers grow tired of her, and her debts bring about her husband's ruin. Emma swallows arsenic and dies an excruciating death.

    It's said that Gustave Flaubert does not judge Emma, and in fact that's partially why the book was banned and he landed in an obscenity trial. But I don't think I agree with that. Isn't making your character a silly, shallow woman and then having her downfall stem from being silly and shallow pretty judgy in of itself? I've read a lot of books about doomed women and unlike most of them, Emma has no redeeming features. In Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy seemed to actually like his heroine. I did not not get that feeling in Madame Bovary.