C'EST MOI


Meravigliosa come sempre, semplicemente perfetta, Isabelle Huppert nell’adattamento del 1991 firmato da Claude Chabrol.

Letto un paio di volte e sempre amato. Uno dei massimi capolavori della letteratura, secondo me.
Flaubert è uno dei sommi: me lo immagino di notte, solo nella sua casa di Rouen, che sono ovviamente stato a visitare, al lume di candela, che 'recita' le parole scritte, ancora e ancora, urlandole, cancellando, limando, riscrivendo, fino a trovare la formula giusta, quella perfetta. Le mot juste.
Perché, lui è con la perfezione che si misurava.
E alla perfezione si è avvicinato, e, secondo me, la perfezione ha raggiunto.



Realistico, il romanzo certamente lo è: non contiene nulla che non sia esistito nella vita reale (e facilissimo da riscontrare attraverso sopralluoghi e testimonianze); e anche se sbuffa ogni tanto "nulla in questa storia è tratto dalla vita, è totalmente inventata", non c'è dubbio che questo autore ha seguito con scrupolo il precetto dello 'scrivere solo di ciò che si conosce'.



Però dopo aver scritto la scena di seduzione nel bosco, nella Corrispondenza si trova: Che delizia scrivere! Non essere più se stessi, ma spaziare per l'universo che si descrive! Oggi, per esempio, mi sentivo uomo e donna, amante e amata, cavalcavo per una foresta in un pomeriggio d'autunno sotto le foglie gialle, e io ero i cavalli, le foglie, il vento, le parole dette da lui e da lei, e il sole scarlatto sopra le loro palpebre semichiuse, gonfie per la passione....
Alberto Arbasino: Certi romanzi, pp 131-132

Friedrich Nietzsche is reported to have said:n  "I go on smiling and laughing for the simple reason that if I don’t smile, I may start crying.”n Smiling is a way to cover up tears, that is to say, you shift your energy from the tears to the smile so that you can forget your tears. But, sad story, everybody is full of tears.
‘Madame Bovary’ has been on my mind in the last couple of months-the real reason why I couldn’t say-but trusting the calling I have eventually managed to get it started (as a matter of fact, it is a revisit after couple of decades). I have been enjoying it up to the moment I started to feel that Madame B. and the people from her surroundings got me too irritated and nervous. Why? I think I am in possession of some valid answers, unless I contradict myself.
Love can never really be a great base for marriage because love is fun and play. I don’t recall now what books/novels has read Madame Bovary in her youth-there were some listed, if I’m not mistaken-but, the basic truth is that if you marry someone for love-only-you will be frustrated, because soon the fun is gone, the newness is gone, and boredom sets in [It is always correct-politically to speak up based on own, personal experience, but, when this is not in place, I usually ground my statements on everything I’ve seen around me, from early age up to present, to have affected my family, relatives, friends, acquaintances, co-workers, etc.].
Marriage should be for deep(er) friendship, deep(er) intimacy. Love is implied in it, but it is not alone, or the only thing to create the bond(age) of marriage. That is to say that there is no reason to marry someone only because of love. So, marriage should be spiritual [heavy word, but it’s the only one I really like to connect to the marriage itself]. There are many things which one can never develop alone. Even your own growth needs someone to respond, someone so intimate that you can open yourself totally to him or her.
But, as per centuries and centuries of recorded history, the only known routine is to go into marriage because of love-name it in different ways, depending on each person. It looks that-according to society conventions-a person cannot love outside marriage, so basically marriage and love (that is the romantic love) should go together, necessarily, in a formalized manner.
So, what is the marriage of Madame & Monsieur Bovary about – just a painful suffering, a long suffering, with false smiling faces. It has simply proved to be a misery from start to end (in most cases, it can be just a convenience.) Their marriage failed because it was not grounded on deeper things: for intimacy, for a co-inherence, to work on something which cannot be done alone, which can be done only in a deep togetherness. He needed a wife, a companion to share his daily life, she needed a lover, but supposedly a lover to love her as per the novels she read and based on which she developed a fantastic imagination on how this should be unfolded. Eventually, the real differences between the characters- certainly there from the start- led to a growing discontent that engulfed all, more and more in time and destroyed the illusion of a (perfect) marriage.
I would not disagree completely with some criteria. In general, or as a rule, the woman can be satisfied with one love, utterly fulfilled, when she looks at her man’s innermost qualities. That is to say that she does not fall in love with a man who has a beautiful muscular body [doesn’t hurt, if it is so], but she falls in love with a man who has charisma – something indefinable, but immensely attractive – who has a mystery to be explored [what a lovely word-mystery, wouldn’t replace it for anything in the world]. She wants her man not to be just a man, but an adventure in discovering consciousness. So far so good ;-) …

...In a better world, with better understanding, we could pay closer attention and learn something from marriage. All human hearts are the same and their ultimate desire is also the same: happiness, perfect and pure happiness.
Like other similar related themes, this novel is a perfect eye-opening. I tend to incline that if I’m not 'blind'-except during certain astrological phases- and if I can still proper see, marriage-as representation of the whole world in a miniature form- it teaches many things: that you don’t know what love is, that you don’t know how to relate, that you don’t know how to communicate, that you don’t know how to commune, that you don’t know how to live with another. Eventually, it teaches you your reality, that something deep inside you needs transformation so that you can be blissful alone and you can be blissful together. So, the bondage is transformed into sharing, that gives freedom for growth to both. It is something like a mirror, showing your face to you in all its different aspects. And, surely it is all needed for achieving maturity.
Most of the differences between men and women are because of (thousands of years) conditioning. They are not fundamental to nature, but there are a few differences which give them unique beauty, individuality. It’s a shame though that this does not become a creative flow between them.
When being in relationship, in a thousand and one ways you are provoked, challenged, seduced. Time, again and again, you come to know your pitfalls, your limitations, your anger, your lust, your possessiveness, your jealousy, your sadness, your happiness all moods come and go, you are constantly in a turmoil. But this is the only way to know who you are. Eventually, the characters let their veils fall and revealed their true faces. Is it fate to blame? Not really. But it can be, too. If we choose to.
What is the secret of remaining happy and married? I don’t know! I assume that nobody has ever known otherwise the secret would have been open to the world.

NB: ≪ A Sufi mystic who had always remained happy was asked…. For seventy years people had watched him, he had never been found sad. One day they asked him, ‘What is the secret of your happiness?’ He said, ‘There is no secret. Every morning when I wake up, I meditate for five minutes and I say to myself, ‘Listen, now there are two possibilities: you can be miserable, or you can be blissful. Choose.’ And I always choose to be blissful. ≫

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)

Necesitaba volver a leer esta maravilla. Muy para vacaciones, y habían un montón de cosas que había olvidado por completo. Me parece una novela que resalta lo desvalidas que estaban las mujeres en esa época, crecían para no poder manejarse en el mundo, tenían que ser protegidas para sobrevivir, cosa que me desesperó. Emma! Sufrí por su infelicidad, y no se diga por su mal manejo de finanzas, que al final la perdió. Ay!! Esta novela hay que leerla, es tan hermosa!

Vladimir Nabokov, somewhere, I think it was in an interview reprinted in Strong Opinions, spoke of coming across his father's copy of Madame Bovary and finding a note scrawled inside: "the unsurpassed pearl..." I agree with that assessment.

This is my third attempt at writing the review for the work. I tried and tried, but found myself at loss with words each time I sat and thought about the character of Emma. Her character, at the outset, is contemptible. A woman, who engages in an ignoble behavior with other man, someone who is not in control of her emotions, someone who doesn’t live in her present, ignores her child and husband for an illicit relationship, lives for her own gratification and is self-indulgent to the point of being a hedonist. No, one cannot forgive her.

To some extent, I agree. I found myself quite angry with her several times, more specifically towards the end, when her husband died and their only child was left to labor. It evoked a kind of rage, as I felt dearly for the child. But I couldn’t bring about myself to loath Emma. No, I couldn’t do that. Rather I felt pity for her, for I could acutely feel the despair which she might have gone through while living a dull provincial life. And many reasons, in my opinion, contributed to her despair. First one being, that she was a woman of an above average intelligence, who was infatuated with grandeur of a bourgeois society. She was a little educated and had been under the influence of what she might have gathered from her school life. If only, she had been exposed to other opportunities to explore more in life, she might have not felt the despair and earnestness to break away from her family. I have witnessed such a case in real life, where owing to an above average intelligence and for a restriction to explore in more in terms of education and career, a woman turned insane. Emma turned to experience adventure and fallacy of love. It is something not to be detested but to be understood.

Secondly, if she was born in a rich family, the society wouldn’t have affected her so. Thirdly and most importantly, if her husband was less sluggish and more enthusiastic, perhaps it would have helped her in finding other outlets for her frustration. As a woman, I think I can safely say that women do not respect men with less ambition. That said, I am, in no way trying to justify the actions taken by Emma. Rather, trying to analyse her reasons for doing so.

Gustave Flaubert has been such a master of the craft! Though through his work, he has given us a glance into the bourgeois culture which prevailed during his times and an account of the result of despair, on the part of a woman, that could arise from an unhappy married life; I think he has also incited us to question the very basis of a married relationship. Though the times have changed, women now more independent and free to indulge in their vocations and hobbies, but still, when it comes to marriage, the bottom line I guess, remains the same.

5 stars for bringing Emma almost alive!

Le podría haber dado perfectamente 5 estrellas, porque es una obra maestra de la Literatura por méritos propios... pero Emma Bovary. Emma Bovary es probablemente uno de los personajes más insufribles que nadie ha creado nunca. Y la cuestión es que su mera existencia eleva la novela a la categoría de clásico. Emma Bovary es real. De hecho, todo el mundo conoce a una Emma Bovary: una pava infantil y melodramática que no sabe lo que quiere y se cree más lista que nadie y a la que todo el mundo engaña porque en realidad es más tonta que meter los dedos en el enchufe.

Emma es un ser vivo, una persona. Una persona a la que me hubiera gustado estrangular en algunas partes de la novela.

Aparte de eso, el libro tiene un ritmo sorprendentemente ágil para ser tan profuso en descripciones, y ello se debe a que las descripciones sirven para ambientar las escenas. Es una novela muy cinematográfica, hay momentos en que incluso ves el plano.

También me sorprendió mucho el sentido del humor. Yo no soy muy aficionada al humor francés, pero lo cierto es que Flaubert tiene un tipo de humor que me gusta y le da un bienvenido toque de ligereza a una historia tan melodramática. Y no es que sea excesivamente melodramática, se podría decir que el autor incluso se muestra sobrio donde podría haberse dejado llevar, pero por supuesto tiene su carga dramática, es la historia que es.

Con todo (especialmente la propia Emma) es un libro que he disfrutado mucho y me alegro de haber leído.

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 Which a Dreamy Scheming Seamstress Chickababe Gets Entangled With Various Members of the Professions, the Merchant Class, Money Lenders, the Landed Gentry and the Aristocracy in a Quest for a Life She Does Not Have

The setting of “Madame Bovary” is one of Realism. Real life goes on around Emma. People work. They provide services. They buy and sell commodities. They borrow and lend money. They repay debts or collect unpaid debts. They get married. They have children and educate them. Their children move away and start families of their own.

n  This is the way of all flesh.n Yet, for all of the Realism, the novel is really (or also) about something else. It’s about the desire for love and happiness, the jewels in this setting.

Emma is rebellious, irreverent, impatient, difficult, disillusioned, capricious. She craves bliss, passion, intoxication, feverish abandon, voluptuous pleasure, joyful effervescence, and succumbs to “the ecstatic transports of adultery”. She wants to be n  “the beloved of every novel, the heroine of every drama, the ‘she’ of every poem.”n She has a “vain longing for a more sublime pleasure.” She aspires to art and beauty in the face of life’s science.

Determined not to be a work of Romanticism, Flaubert’s novel dismantles the effect of Romanticism on real people, well, at least one real person, Emma. n  However, just as Flaubert was trying to avoid an excess of Romanticism, he was protesting against an excess of Realism.n

Romanticism could prove fatal, but the Realism of contemporary bourgeois capitalist society had proven to be boring, in effect, a premature death.

Emma confronted the harshness of modern life by clinging to the Romanticism that she believed would help her survive Reality. She clung to the world promoted by Romance Fiction. This Fiction created a fantasy world that she aspired to.

At the time, Flaubert and his friends saw it as outmoded. Who could have guessed that it would become not just a mainstream element of capitalist society, but one that sustains, not challenges, its illusions about itself? In our contemporary real life, people could not and would not work, buy, sell, borrow, repay, etc (i.e., be consumers), unless they had these fantasies.

If within the fabric of “Madame Bovary” Romanticism and Realism confronted and opposed each other, then what eventually emerged in modern society was a synthesis that preserved both in a perpetual death grip. In both Fiction and Reality, they are its warp and weft.

n  Each needs the other to survive, even if the host, Emma, us, might die in the process.n

There’s a sense in which the novel doesn’t just anticipate Modernism, but it anticipates Post-Modernism or, at least, Meta-Fiction.

Emma’s world-view is taken over and subjugated by the expectations and conventions of Romantic Fiction. She allows it to govern the direction of her real life (within the novel).

This relationship with literature becomes part of the subject matter of the novel. It’s concerned with the influence of previous novels on one of its own characters. As a result, the novel positions itself against all of its predecessors. n  It adopts the stylings of Romantic Fiction, while simultaneously subverting it. n It draws a line in the sand, implicitly challenging the past to cross the line, and then turns to the future. What it sees is not necessarily positive.

Flaubert does not position himself as a God-like narrator whose characters are a vehicle for Time or Fate to progress society on its journey towards some happy ending. Flaubert uses “free indirect narration” to enable us to learn a little something about what is going on in everybody’s minds.

Earlier, he had written, “the artist in his work should be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” Thus, while Flaubert composed and is present in his work of fiction, he is invisible, and the novel’s authority derives partly from the impression that it is simply documenting what the characters have brought upon themselves or, from a more political viewpoint, what society had done to them.

It's difficult to sympathise much with Emma as some sort of prototypical strong, passionate, sensitive, sensual woman. n  She is a victim of her own deluded sentimentalism and desire.n

Emma was wasted in and by her life. She was a “stupid girl” in the same way that Mick Jagger would explain his dissatisfaction in his song by that name, “I wasn't in a good relationship. Or I was in too many bad relationships.”

Emma wasn’t happy with her marital relationship, and in seeking something better, she fell into too many bad ones.

So, Emma is a warning to us. She died so that we might live, so that feminism might live, and so that women might love genuinely, passionately and realistically. n  She died so that neither woman nor man nor their relationships might be destroyed by their fantasies.nShe was a reality check designed to keep our reality in check.

To paraphrase Sartre (who was writing about Flaubert himself), I would like you to feel, understand, and know Emma’s character both as totally individual and totally representative of her (and perhaps our?) times. In so far as she is representative, she is also representative of men, who can equally be unrealistic.

It’s possible that this was what Flaubert had in mind when he remarked, n  “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!”n Perhaps, she is not just Flaubert, but all of us.

Of course, Realism without Romanticism can be a dry and humourless and mechanical affair. Perhaps, then, the moral of Flaubert’s tale is that Realism needs to be a bit more Romantic, and Romanticism needs to be a bit more Realistic?

Two thirds of the way through, Emma speculates that, if "before the defilement of marriage and the disillusionment of adultery, she could have set down her life upon some great, solid heart, then virtue, tenderness, desire and duty would all have been joined together, and she would never have descended from such lofty felicity...[but] she knew, now, how paltry were the passions exaggerated by art."

Still, even this vision depends on the existence of some "great, solid heart." And the realisation comes too late.

Earlier, Charles Bovary’s first wife had suggested that “a tonic for [my] health and a little more love” would be adequate. Not everybody will be content with this prescription.

It seems to counsel us to make do with what we've got, but it’s practical advice and not a bad start.

Either way, n  we need both fuel and a flame to light and maintain a fire.n



SOUNDTRACK:

Bettie Serveert - "Attagirl"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge40nx...



VERSE:

Loveseat

On a bench seat
In the arbor,
They made love with
Carefree ardour.


A Box at the Opera
[In the Words of Flaubert]

Quite unable to refrain,
Emma watched from high above
A nice young dandy strutting
About the parterre, resting
The palm of his yellow glove
On the gold knob of his cane.


Rodolphe Boulanger Weighs Up Emma
[A Haiku in the Words of Flaubert]

She's gasping for love
Like a carp gasps for water
On a kitchen bench.


Young Leon

Leon’s long, fine eyelashes
Made him seem so handsome.
His bearing radiated
A candor so exquisite.
The smooth skin of his cheeks flushed
Light red with desire for her.
She longed to feel his kisses
And hoped that he might visit.


Edgar Lagardy

What audience
Could not be awed,
Watching the star,
Whom all adored,
Outraged lover,
The role he scored,
Jealous, angry,
Striding towards
His enemy
Across the boards,
While brandishing
His naked sword?


Emma Bovary’s Ode to Jay Gatsby
[A Meta-Fiction Dedicated to Gary]

I know it might seem crazy:
If only you’d been near,
You alone could have had me.
We’d be alive, my dear,
Instead of that bitch, Daisy.



An Hypothesis Concerning the Apothecary
[Inspired by a Sologknigian Thread]



Any apothecary
Who’s worth his salt and petre
Would be able to divine
What it was that Homais made,
Helped by his rock-hard pestle,
Inside his petit mortar.

Lest his balm did not suffice
To cure hysteria,
He studied “Conjugal Love”,
The skilled work of a surgeon,
Procuring paroxysms
Via digital techniques.

Without a doctor’s permit,
The magistrate determined
His practised consultation
In the back room of his store
Not to be innocuous,
Hence he came to be struck off.

His treatment, now you know why,
It worked a charm for Emma,
Creating an appetite
For stimulus that no one
Husband, aided by Homais,
Could aspire to satisfy.

Well, this newfound craving,
It was to be her downfall.
It’s sad, because she would still
Be alive today, if she
Had had the wherewithal,
To tell Homais to fuck off.

This book! I'm so split on what I think.

Firstly it's a typical classic, it's way longer than it needs to be and overly descriptive. Some chapters I'm really into it and others I'm looking around for any distraction. I found it hard to keep my attention from wandering while reading this book.

Secondly, madam bovary! What a girl. I'm guessing she was the original bored desperate housewife? I kind of liked her, her inability to settle, her boredom, her disappointment with life, her need for something more exciting.

Mixed feeling on this one so three stars, good in places but a bore in others, am glad I've finally read it though, that's another classic off the list.

Madame Bovary was a real treat. I'm glad that I chose to read it at this point in my life, and not any younger, as I'm not entirely sure that I would have been appreciative of the story, and the richness of the characters. I now know, why Madame Bovary is such a popular novel.

The story centres on Emma, a woman that believes in dreaming, passionate love and adventure, and when she marries Charles Bovary, it is evident to her, that she is not going to get that with him. So, she seeks her needs elsewhere, with two other men. She delves into two affairs, and while her needs are sufficed, she ends up in large amounts of debt, which inevitably, leads to destruction and despair.

Flaubert was a wordsmith, and his beautiful, life-like descriptions of everyday life scenes, that were so in depth, such as the club-foot operation, had me racing through this book. I felt like I was in the room, observing that operation, and I could almost smell the sweat. As for the tragedy itself, I thought it was rather drawn out, and I think in this case, it needed to be. It was shocking, unthinkable and I felt my heart banging in my chest. It takes something extraordinary to be able to do that, and this book has succeeded.

4.5 Stars ⭐️

Mel