Emma Bovary is one of my new favourite women in fiction. God she's such a BAMF. She's literally Beyoncé of the 19th century. This is how heroines are meant to be written! (Hear that Jane Austen you god awful woman?!) This is the story of a woman who gets married to the most boring man ever and decides, "fuck this, this guy's a wet blanket, I'm gonna have some adulterous affairs, yay!". It's really good, read it.

اين كتاب بدون شك همه ما رو به ياد آنا كارنينا ميندازه، البته مادام بوواري قبل از اون نوشته شده.
بهرحال مسئله ايي كه تو تين دو كتاب نظرمو جلب كرد،ميزان اثري بود كه خيانت زنها ميذاشت بر زندگي خونوادشون و صد البته خودمشي اونا.
من سعي در توجيه خيانت ندارم، ولي يك سوال مهم پيش اومده چرا نويسنده ها ميخوان خيانت زنها را اينقدر بزرگ جلوه بدن؟
طبيعتا تو تاريخ اين چند هزار سال اخير تعداد خيانت مردان بيشتر از زنان بوده ولي من هيچ كتابي نخوندم كه آخرش يه مرد خودشو بكشه!
چرا تنها رسوايي خيانت براي زنهاست؟
گويا وقتي نويسنده اين كتابو مينويسه به ترويج ابتذال متهم ميشه، اگه بجاي اما، شارل خيانت ميكرد آيا بازم نويسنده متهم ميشد؟

My fifth or sixth reading of my favorite novel in my favorite translation, that of Lydia Davis, this time read simultaneously with Nabokov's class lecture on the book which made for a transcendent experience. I love the Davis translation best, I will never tire of Madame Bovary and once it and Nab's lectures were published my love for Flaubert's masterpiece increased exponentially.

Madame Bovary is a triumph of structure and symbolism, in my opinion the best-written novel of all time, each word placed like a gem in a setting, and that these beautiful words and scenes are so spot-on satirical that I often laugh out loud while reading it is, for me, wondrous, amazing.

Just about every character is unlikeable. Emma is not the pitiable victim of circumstances, she's the vain and delusional star of her own soap opera. And the iceberg that sinks her ship every time, sometimes drowning others she's pulled aboard. I'll never understand how people can admire or even feel for this woman who observes that her own young daughter "is ugly." Never satisfied, she constantly creates her own weather system and it's always storming.

So Emma is a very easy mark for Rodolphe, the player, with his box of souvenirs of all the women he's seduced. Upon meeting her he thinks:

"That one’s gasping for love like a carp for water on a kitchen table. With three pretty compliments, that one would adore me, I’m sure of it. It would be lovely! Charming! . . . Yes, but how to get rid of the woman afterward?”

Whereas Emma believes she's encountered the great and wonderful love akin to those in the romance novels she's mistaken for real life. Flaubert crafted Madame Bovary with the level of talent with which great architects designed the best cathedrals, and he built it with some of the finest symbolism to be found in all of literature. Yet it's funny. Wry, ironic, satiric and yes, funny.

We are so used to realism now and so steeped in mediocre stories and melodrama that it sometimes happens that readers miss the fullness of what Flaubert accomplished with Madame Bovary, which influenced Proust, Joyce and arguably almost everyone who came after. I can't recommend strongly enough reading Nabokov's class lecture from Lectures on Literature along with the book. Though I'd read his lecture at least twice, I'd never read them simultaneously and doing so multiplied the joy I got from this literary fireworks display.

Said Nabokov to his classes as he read from his typed notes with their scrawled marginalia semester after semester:

"Stylistically it is prose doing what poetry is supposed to do."

And in Lectures, the original and the Russian, one can see his handwritten notes, scrawls all over the page, insertions, deletions, the great brain revising, improving, editing. One may not agree with all of his conclusions but it's impossible to ignore the depth of his reading. To read them together is like taking a quality guided tour of an exhibition during which your exceptionally perceptive guide provides a magnificent overview as well as pointing out the smallest superb details and so expanding one's experience, understanding and appreciation of the work.

"The point is that she is a bad reader. She reads books emotionally, in a shallow juvenile manner, putting herself in this or that female character’s place. Flaubert does a very subtle thing. In several passages he lists all the romantic clichés dear to Emma’s heart; but his cunning choice of these cheap images and their cadenced arrangement along the curving phrase produce an effect of harmony and art."

Homais the blowhard is the most obvious (and fun) fool, the character who best epitomizes Flaubert's disdain for the small-mindedness of the middle class at that time and in that town in what was his contemporary France. So Homais is a leading character whose presence affects everyone else's stories, who is the most obvious blowhard and so gets many of the best lines. Says Nab of Flaubert's writing for the pharmacist:

"He uses the same artistic trick when listing Homais’s vulgarities. The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art."

The rest are perhaps not so obvious. Charles is as much a fool as Emma, living in a house increasingly crowded with expensive furniture and Emma's beautiful wardrobe which he knows perfectly well he can't afford. From the outset Flaubert telegraphs this as, (one of my favorite images) in the wedding procession Emma lets go of Charles's arm to tend to her wedding gown. Her first crush and second lover Leon is a bore upon whom Emma superimposes her romance-novel sensibility to turn him into something he is not until she is forced to confront his dull, yes here it comes, utterly bougie nature.

Of the scene at the fair -- a groundbreaking scene in many ways, which Flaubert spent three months writing and it is perfection -- where, among other things, Rodolphe rattles off his routine seductive speech that he knows will work on Emma (during which the judges below are giving out the award for best manure!), Flaubert wrote to his lover:

“I am in the act of composing a conversation between a young man and a young woman about literature, the sea, mountains, music, and all other so-called poetic subjects. It will be the first time, I think, that a novel appears where fun is made of the leading lady and her young man. But irony does not impair pathos—on the contrary..."

Nabokov: "But gradually, like old pieces of scenery, her life begins to shake and fall apart. Beginning with chapter 4 of the third part, fate, abetted by Flaubert, proceeds to destroy her with beautiful precision."

If most books are akin to shacks, some to lovely homes, others to palaces, for me Madame Bovary, despite the limitations of translation, is a cathedral. To visit repeatedly is to notice something else striking each time: the way this area transitions to that, that bit of light shining through a particular part of that stained glass window, that shadow falling so gracefully in that place one hasn't seen a shadow before. It's familiar but there's always something new, breathtaking to behold.

I love this book so dearly, admire Flaubert's art and craft in Madame Bovary as much as that of any other book, and so each reading provides that wonderfully familiar and also new experience.

The many people I know or whose reviews I read or those film versions I've watched who misunderstand Madame Bovary aren't misunderstanding it because they're not careful readers. It's because of that subtlety, the art and the fact that once published it would affect so many major and insignificant works and forever change literature that Flaubert's breathtaking art, the substance and style, are sometimes lost to modern readers whose focus is the perceived drama, the plot, identifying with Emma, a woman so vain that as she lays on her deathbed she asks for a mirror. Because Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary in a realistic style and satirized everyone so poetically, with delicacy and strength steeped in symbolism, a new form of the novel, magnificent in its focus on the petty and the small.

In Flaubert's time there were a number of Emmas who upon publication came forward claiming to be the woman upon whom Flaubert based Madame Bovary. Wanting to be seen as the model for a small-minded, small-town, materialistic, deluded, vain, destructive character whose ridiculous idealized notions of romance come from books, whose attachments are as shallow as her materialism, whose conscious decision to swap sex for spirituality is so over the top the priest distrusts it, who careens through her brief, dissatisfied life bringing more and more harm to herself until she causes the ultimate harm -- that these woman wanted to claim her as themselves: oh the irony!

In this case, I think it was a bad idea to know stuff about Madame Bovary and Gustave Flaubert before starting the book. My high school English teacher loved to talk about books - and I know how she feels - but the result was quite a few spoilers for a lot of European classics. I think that knowing the author's intentions can be a bad thing and I'm certain that I was unable to keep it from influencing the way I viewed Emma Bovary and her behaviour. If you're curious about these intentions of Flaubert's: He hated the rising bourgeoisie during the nineteenth century, therefore he intentionally painted them as silly fools obsessed with romance and never satisfied with the good things life gave them.

Even so, three stars means I liked it and I did. The novel reminds me of a cross between Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Painted Veil. I found it better than the former but nowhere near as good as the latter. It is built on the same ideas of a woman being unhappy in marriage and turning to other comforts and affairs in order to try and gain some happiness and romance from life. Emma Bovary starts off a character much like Kitty from The Painted Veil, she is naive and fickle, her new husband is nice and kind but he cannot hold her interest. She longs for passion and excitement and she becomes delusional in the face of empty promises made by her secret lover.

She is a far better character than Constance Chatterley, or perhaps what I mean is that I find her selfishness and dissatisfaction with everything in life more interesting. I am not a big fan of Lawrence - a man who I believe wrote mediocre romance novels and owes his fame to what could at the time be considered shock tactics like "ohmigod, female orgasms!" and "ohmigod, affairs with the working class!" All I'm saying is that Lawrence was lucky the term "mommy porn" wasn't around back then. But Maugham is an entirely different story and I think where Emma Bovary fails and Kitty succeeds is in character growth.

In The Painted Veil, Kitty starts out naive and annoying, at times you'd like to strangle her for being so frustrating... but she suffers, she changes, she adapts and she grows into a different human being. Emma Bovary is a rather hopeless case, and if you did happen to read the spoiler in the first paragraph then you'll probably understand why I think this was Flaubert's intention all along. I will give him every credit where it's due, I think he paints a very interesting and detailed picture of a unhappy woman's life and mental workings. It has been pointed out that he doesn't judge Emma, but I sort of think he does in an indirect way. I mean, Emma Bovary and those closest to her are the ones who suffer in the end because she was so delusional and unable to be happy and satisfied with what she had. But, like I said, my opinion is undoubtedly influenced by what I already knew of Flaubert.

One more thing: I don't believe Gustave Flaubert is really Gustave Flaubert. I think he is Hercule Poirot O.O

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Il fatto che su Goodreads questo libro abbia un punteggio medio più basso di quello di Cinquanta sfumature di grigio è la prova definitiva del decadimento culturale della nostra società.
"Ve lo meritate Christian Grey!" (cit. Nanni Moretti, probabilmente)

Madame Bovary, c’est qui ? Bovary, c’est d’abord le nom de Charles, le personnage qui ouvre et clôt le roman, si bien qu’on pourrait presque affirmer que c’est lui le héros, petit médecin de campagne, gentil mais sans talent, mari cocu mais pas jaloux. Un Bovary un peu bovin, en somme. Et Madame Bovary, c’est plusieurs personnages à la fois : Madame Bovary mère, la marâtre qui ne supporte pas que son fils appartienne à une autre ; Héloïse Dubuc, la première femme de Charles, dont les pieds au fond du lit sont froids comme des glaçons ; c’est potentiellement aussi la petite Berthe, la fille de Charles, qui finira orpheline dans une filature de coton. Mais c’est surtout Emma.

Emma est jolie comme un cœur et fait tourner la tête des hommes autour d’elle. Elle, cependant, s’ennuie ferme avec son petit mari médecin au fin fond de son trou normand avec toujours les mêmes insupportables voisins : Homais (Emma inversé), le pharmacien prétentieux, scientiste et anticlérical ; l’abbé Bournisien, « médecin des âmes », d’une sottise à faire pleurer la sainte vierge ; le maire Tuvache (un autre bovin) et bien d’autres encore. Bref, dans tout ce tas d’imbéciles, il n’y en a pas un pour rattraper les autres. Alors Emma, don Quichotte normande, lit des romans pour échapper à la mesquinerie ambiante et à la déprime – on la comprend ! Elle lit Walter Scott et Lamartine, des livres d’aventure et des romans pieux ou à l’eau de rose, Jane Austen, peut-être – en poussant un peu le bouchon, elle lit les équivalents de Barbara Cartland au XXème siècle ou de Colleen Hoover en ce premier quart du XXIème. (Elle lit tellement qu’elle mourra en vomissant de l’encre.)

Alors quand vient à passer quelque « beau gosse » rêveur (Léon) ou un « bad boy » ombrageux (Rodolphe), évidemment, Emma succombe à la volupté – bon, on peut encore la comprendre... Et quand vient à passer quelque vendeur de fringues de marques et autres bagatelles, elle succombe encore et dépense généreusement les économies de son petit mari le médecin – on la comprend, mais, il faut bien l’avouer, de moins en moins. Bref, toutes ces histoires d’adultère petit-bourgeois et de dettes impossibles à payer semblent assez triviales et par moment franchement dégoutantes, « cette couleur de moisissure d’existence de cloporte », comme aurait dit l’auteur lui-même.

Si ce n’est que, en matière d’auteur, nous sommes entre les mains de Gustave Flaubert, le père du roman moderne, et cela change tout. D’abord parce que chaque page du livre ou presque est une prouesse stylistique : ironie mordante, descriptions pénétrantes et sonores, jeu étourdissant et souvent hilarant sur les perspectives, entremêlement des voix narratives, cut up et montage alterné. Ainsi, certaines scènes sont d’inoubliables morceaux de bravoure : les comices agricoles (II,8), la lettre de Rodolphe (II,13), la promenade a cheval qui finit en galanterie (II,9), la promenade en fiacre qui finit pareillement (III,1), l’opération du pied bot qui finit différemment (II,11), l’agonie d’Emma qui finit encore bien pire (III,8).

En définitive, le monde n’est décidemment pas à la hauteur de l’absolu auquel Emma aspire. Madame Bovary, c’est l’héroïne romantique qui a soif de glamour, de lyrisme, de sublime, et qui retombe toujours dans la boue du prosaïque et du sordide. C’est l’albatros, l’ange qui tourne à la pute, la vierge à la triste figure, l’idéal qui rechute dans le spleen. En ce sens, oui sans doute, Madame Bovary, c’est Gustave Flaubert.

Add: Il existe plusieurs adaptations cinématographiques du roman de Flaubert. L’une des plus remarquables est sans doute celle de Claude Chabrol. Le ton sec du cinéaste, maître de l’ellipse et du sous-entendu correspond à la pudeur du récit flaubertien, mais ne parvient toutefois pas à rendre les voltiges stylistiques de l’écrivain. En revanche, Isabelle Huppert est magnifique, tour à tour lumineuse et torturée.

I read this a long time ago but the only thing I could remember about it was that I read it a long time ago. Also that some lady was married to some really boring guy. This turned out to be true. Madame Bovary was like the young Juliette Binoche from Three Colours



And her husband was like Jessie Plemons from The Power of the Dog



He is the guy who the instant he gets married puts on fifty pounds and ages 20 years so it is not to anyone’s surprise that the hot tomato that is his wife gets so she glazes over as soon as she hears the chilling phrase "Honey I’m home." Here is Juliette’s – sorry, Emma’s very own father, pondering Charles Bovary :

It was true he thought him a bit of a loser, and not what he’d have chosen as a son-in-law, but people said he was careful with his money

Not a ringing endorsement.

Emma, she is grabbing Charles to get out of the house where she feels like a prisoner, the impulsive fate of many young women. Quite soon she is feeling like she swapped one prison for another.

Flaubert can make exquisite phrases, here is one :

Her will, like the veil attached to her hat, flutters with every breeze; always there is the desire inviting her on, and, always, convention holding her back.

Desire for what? Well, her husband's idea of passion was to have sex once a week on Saturday night in the exact same position if he wasn't too tired. She thinks life should have more possibilities. She is looking for something other than the smothering blandness and monotony of being a rural doctor’s pretty missus, something to get her blood surging, something, anything.

What enraged her was that Charles seemed quite unaware of her anguish. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed to her a mindless insult…. She was sometimes astonished at the appalling possibilities that came into her head; and yet she must go on smiling, go on hearing herself repeat that she was happy, and let everyone believe it!

Eventually she meets a local rich guy who is a Player, which, the Urban Dictionary reminds us, is

A Man or Woman that has MORE than ONE person think that they are the ONLY ONE.

This Rodolphe takes one look at Emma and thinks

Poor little thing! Gasping for love like a carp gasping for water on a kitchen table. With just three little words of love, it would worship you, I’d bet on it, it would be so tender and charming! Yes, but how to get rid of it afterwards?

So they have this years-long affair and she almost melts his heart – but no, not really. Are you kidding, not Rodolphe! Eventually, as you might predict :

Certain of being loved, he stopped taking pains to please her, and imperceptibly his manner changed.

Flaubert skewers this boyfriend without mercy, allowing us into his player brain most uncomfortably :

He had heard all these things said to him so many times that they no longer held any surprises for him. Emma was just like all his mistresses, and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion., which never varies in its forms and its expression. He could not see – this man of such broad experience – the difference of feeling beneath the similarity of expression.

People say that Flaubert doesn’t comment on his characters and just pins them up like a butterfly collector, but as you see, he is explicit in telling us Rodolphe is a nasty nasty man, but, you know, normally nasty. Here’s another great turn of phrase about this creep :

His pleasures, like boys playing in a school yard, had so thoroughly trampled on his heart that nothing green would grow there

There is a great moment when he has to write a big goodbye letter to Emma – she’s preparing to run off with him, abandon her husband and daughter in a snap – she is so in love with him – and he finished the letter then thinks hmm, there’s something missing, and drips a single drop of water onto the page. Yes, a tear will make it look more heartfelt.

The intimate story of Emma’s decline and fall is psychologically gripping, even though this is a simple age-old story we have had before in a thousand variations. Flaubert was the great anti-romantic, he was the auditor of human disillusion. You are with Emma so closely throughout this novel that her death, even though you know it will come, is still shocking. It was very similar to watching the great documentary Amy, about Amy Winehouse. The final scene where we see her being taken out of her house in a body bag gives you a real jolt of horror.

Readers should be warned of one thing however : James Joyce said he wanted to write Ulysses so that if Dublin burned to the ground they could rebuild it by referring to his novel. He may have got that super-realist detail mania from Flaubert who thinks that Madame Bovary should be the encyclopedia of rural France, so prepare for boring conversations between pharmacists and doctors and farmers and other farmers and a 60 page description of an agricultural fair. Some of this can be zzzzzzz. I would normally knock off half a star for that kind of thing but not in this case.

Madame Bovary is a great novel. 5 stars, of course.

بیشتر از اینکه مجذوب خود داستان بشم مجذوب پردازش داستان شدم. فراز و نشیب هایی لذت بخش که حوصله ام رو سر نبرد و خسته ام نکرد. جمله هایی که منظم و با دقت کنار هم چیده شده بودن و شخصیت هایی که کنش ها و واکنش های به جا و مناسبی داشتن.

This is one of the books that has had a profound effect on my life. The moral? Be happy with what you have and where you are!!! Mme. Bovary fritters away her entire life with thoughts of, "If only X would happen, THEN I could be truly happy" and yet she never is. She gets everything she thinks she wants only to find out she's still not content.

I read this while I was engaged and at the time, thought, "Well, I'll be happier when I'm married, but once I am, then life will be fabulous". After a few years I found myself playing the same role as Mme. Bovary: "Once I can get pregnant and have kids, then I'll be happy"; "Once I'm not pregnant and sick anymore, THEN I can be happy"; "Once we get out of this apartment and into our house, then I will surely be happy"; "Once the baby starts sleeping through the night, I can definitely be happy"; "Once the baby is out of diapers...etc. etc. ad nauseum...literally!

I want to be content with my circumstances, whatever they may be, and Mme. Bovary is a reminder of what happens to those who are unable to find contentment in the journey, and are continually seeking yet another unsatisfying destination.

Madame Bovary & The Science of Adultery

Some universal features stand out when we talk of the human mating system.

1. First, women most commonly seek monogamous marriage—even in societies that allow polygamy. Rare exceptions notwithstanding, they want to choose carefully and then, as long as he remains worthy, monopolize a man for life, gain his assistance in rearing the children, and perhaps even die with him.

2. Second, women do not seek sexual variety per se. There are exceptions, of course, but fictional and real women regularly deny that nymphomania holds any attraction for them, and there is no reason to disbelieve them. The temptress interested in a one-night stand with a man whose name she does not know is a fantasy fed by male pornography. Lesbians, free of constraints imposed by male nature, do not suddenly indulge in sexual promiscuity; on the contrary, they are remarkably monogamous. None of this is surprising: Female animals gain little from sexual opportunism, for their reproductive ability is limited not by how many males they mate with but how long it takes to bear offspring. In this respect men and women are very different.

3. But third, women are sometimes unfaithful. Not all adultery is caused by men. Though she may rarely or never be interested in casual sex with a male prostitute or a stranger, a woman, in life as in soap operas, is perfectly capable of accepting or provoking an offer of an affair with one man whom she knows, even if she is “happily” married at the time. This is a paradox.

It can be resolved in one of three ways:

1. We can blame adultery on men, asserting that the persuasive powers of seducers will always win some hearts, even the most reluctant. Call this the “Dangerous Liaisons” explanation.

2. Or we can blame it on modern society and say that the frustrations and complexities of modern life, of unhappy marriages and so on, have upset the natural pattern and introduced an alien habit into human females. Call this the “Dallas” explanation.

3. Or we can suggest that there is some valid biological reason for seeking sex outside marriage without abandoning the marriage—some instinct in women not to deny themselves the option of a sexual “plan B” when plan A does not work out so well. Call this the “Emma Bovary” strategy.

The “Emma Bovary” strategy.

It takes two hands to clap, as the old saying goes among men when blamed for being adulterous by nature.

And knowing the evolutionary logic, we have to ask: What’s in it for the women?

For the males it is obvious enough: Adulterers father more young. But it is not at all clear why the female is so often unfaithful. Birkhead and Møller, in their experiments, rejected several suggestions: that she is adulterous because of a genetic side effect of the male adulterous urge, that she is ensuring some of the sperm she gets is fertile, that she is bribed by the philandering males (as seems to be the case in some human and ape societies). None of these fit the exact facts. Nor did it quite work to blame her infidelity on a desire for genetic variety. There seems to be little point in having more varied children than she would have anyway.

Birkhead and Møller were left with the belief that females benefit from being promiscuous because it enables them to have their genetic cake and eat it—to follow the Emma Bovary strategy.

A female needs a husband who will help look after her young, but she might be unlucky and might find all the best husbands taken. Her best tactic is therefore to mate with a mediocre husband or a husband with a good social position/job/inheritance and have an affair with a genetically superior neighbor.

This theory is supported by the facts: Females always choose more dominant, older, or more “attractive” lovers than their husbands; they do not have affairs with bachelors (presumably rejects) but with other females’ husbands; and they sometimes incite competition between potential lovers and choose the winners.

Baker and Bellis, in their experimental results, do not claim to have found more than a tantalizing hint that this is so, but they have tried to measure the extent of cuckoldry in human beings. In a block of flats in Liverpool, they found by genetic tests that fewer than four in every five people were the sons of their ostensible fathers. In case this had something to do with Liverpool, they did the same tests in southern England and got the same result. Like birds, women may be—quite unconsciously—having it both ways by conducting affairs with genetically more valuable men while not leaving their husbands.

In short, the reason adultery is so common is that it enables a male to have more young and enables a female to have better young.

[ One of the most curious results to come out of bird studies in recent years has been the discovery that “attractive” males make inattentive fathers. Nancy Burley, whose zebra finches consider one another more or less attractive according to the color of their leg bands, first noticed this, and Anders Moller has since found it to be true of swallows as well. When a female mates with an attractive male, he works less hard and she works harder at bringing up the young. It is as if he feels that he has done her a favor by providing superior genes and therefore expects her to repay him with harder work around the nest. This, of course, increases her incentive to find a mediocre but hardworking husband and cuckold him by having an affair with a superstud next door. ]

In any case, the principle—marry a nice guy but have an affair with your boss or marry a rich but ugly man and take a handsome lover—is not unknown among female human beings. It is called having your cake and eating it, too. Flaubert’s Emma Bovary wanted to keep both her handsome lover and her wealthy husband. It might not always work out along the evolutionary plan…

~ adapted wholesale from Matt Ridley’s discussion of adultery among birds in The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

Emma is a rather silly, very passionate ( too much so) bored, uneducated to the reality of the real world young woman, who believes in the romantic novels she reads, moonlight walks, eerie, forbidding castles, dangerous flights into unknown, and strange lands always trying to escape their frightening captors... brave, handsome men, that are faithful to their beautiful virtuous women, fighting the evil, monstrous, corrupt but attractive libertines and the hero rescuing them in the nick of time...Emma lives on a farm in mid nineteenth century France, the widower, a remote still gentle father, Monsieur Rouault anxious to get rid of his useless daughter, and though he enjoys the work, is not very good at it, ( farming) but a considerably better businessman; being an only child, she wants excitement. Hating the monotonous country, dreaming about the titillating city, Paris and the fabulous people and things there. Yet meeting and marrying the dull, common , hardworking good doctor, Charles Bovary who fixed her father's broken leg, he adores his pretty wife, life has to be better elsewhere she thinks, so agrees to the marriage proposal. Moving to the small, tedious village of Tostes , Emma regrets soon her hasty marriage. Even the birth of a daughter, Berthe who she neglects, not a loving mother the maid raises , has no effect on her gloomy moods. She craves romance, her husband is not like the men in her books, ordinary looking, not fearless or intelligent, words do not inspire coming out of his mouth, he lacks the intense feelings she wants. After moving to another quiet village, Yonville (Ry) clueless Bovary thinks the change of scenery, will lift his listless wife out of her funk. The local wealthy landowner Rodolphe Boulanger, sees the pretty Emma, senses her unhappiness and seduces , a veteran at this sort of thing, he has had many mistresses in the past. At first the secret, quite perilous, thrilling rendezvous behind the back of Emma's house, clandestine notes, reckless walks in the predawn mornings to his Chateau, reminds Emma of her novels... but everything becomes routine, no better than married life. Rodolphe gets annoyed, unexcited, he also doesn't feel like the beginning, sends a letter breaking off the affair. The emotional Emma becomes very ill, her husband fears that she may die, puzzled at the sudden sickness. A slow recover ensues, Emma still has the same husband, starts another affair with a clerk, shy Leon Dupuis, younger than she more grateful too not like the previous lover, the erratic Madame Bovary is in control. In the nearby town of Rouen in Normandy they meet every week, until this also becomes uninteresting, the spendthrift woman behind her trusting, loving, naive , husband's back drives them to ruin through her unreasonable buying sprees . Emma Bovary learns much too late, that the only person who loves her, is the unremarkable man she married. What can I say, love or hate this , it remains a controversial classic , the crowds flock to.

داستان تلخی بود...از اون تلخی های زننده ای که از حقیقت محض سرچشمه می گیرند
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اگر رنج های ما به حال کسی سودی داشت می توانستیم به نام این که فداکاری می کنیم خود را دلداری دهیم