Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

Indulge me a moment while I relate a short tale. More years ago than I care to remember, when I was at school, we were assigned, in a French oral class, the task of working in pairs, one of us taking the part of a police officer and the other a witness, to converse in French, asking for and giving the description of a person spotted at the scene of some fictitious crime. I worked with my friend Louise and, although this is blatant boasting, I have to say that we were both some distance ahead of the rest of our classmates in our proficiency of the language. I took the part of the police officer and, having established that Louise could offer a description of this shady ...

Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Emma Bovary is bored. She’s bored with her humdrum life; married to a boring and mediocre doctor she lives under the burden that people judge her only relative to her husband and she struggles to find her own identity. She fills her empty days reading chick-lit romance novels and shopping before embarking on a string of adulterous affairs trying to find a man who will love her and appreciate her as a person in her own right. So far, so Desperate Housewives. The bookshop shelves are filled with this kind chick-lit stuff, so what makes this book stand out? Well firstly it ...

I have just read the other reviews of Madame Bovary, and all expressed disbelief that such a borng, cliched book could be regarded as one of the greatest works of all time. But without wishing to get all pretentious about it, that is the whole point. First a word of warning. If you are looking for a good read, this is definitely not the book for you. It features the usual 19th century affairs, swooning, grand balls and melodrama, and it all too predictably follows a plot of affairs going wrong for a young naive woman. The characters are shallow, your sympathy for the main character mixed, and it is all so terribly frustrating. Genius. The whole point ...