Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining, but hard to follow
Review: Madame Bovary(Emma) was about a woman who had a couple of affairs, but the attention of the story was on how the relationship of Monsieur Bovary(Charles)and his wife progressed. The aspect I found most intriguing was that Flaubert wrote the book in such a way that when she was with the other men, one couldn't help but think about how Charles is going to feel when/if he finds out. Despite the plot centering around his wife, I felt that he was the protagonist in the story because he had a good heart when after what his wife did to him, on numerous occasions, he shouldn't have had one at all.
The storyline is interesting but it ishard to follow since the text is unabridged. Half the book is just a blob of names and places that after a while become blended together and much effort has to be put into remembering the second tier characters. But, overall, it is a good and worthwhile book if you have enough time and patience to decipher the confusing text.
Rating: 
Summary: Well written, ... characters
Review: Madame Bovary is a good book with a few flaws. First and foremost, large parts of it it are kind of boring, When I tried to explain the book to someone else, i found that i could basically condense the bulk of the book into a few carefully worded sentences. This does not a good book make. The escapades which the characters involve themselves in are not very interesting, and are largely repetitious, albeit with a little character growth resulting.
Fortunately, the book is written quite well. The aforementioned characters, whom i happen to hate, are actually pretty well fleshed out, and as such, come across as real people. When they do certain things, it may be predictable, but only because we know them so well that we can anticipate what they will do.
The descriptions in the book are also largely well done. There certainly are alot of them, but they are all very vivid and engaging. This makes concrete things, like the villages in which the book takes place, very believable.
Finally, the plot progressions, though frequently dull, made logical sense, and in retrospect, the way the ending plays out is inevitable. Though the book slowed to a crawl at times, it was always engaging and fully fleshed out, creating a story which is believable.
Rating: 
Summary: Sitting On The Beach With The Bovary's
Review: Gustave Flauberts Madame Bovary is an easy read, despite the French translations. When I had first starting reading the book, it seemed as if Charles, Madames husband was the main character. Those first few chapters were rough, however Charles kept them moving along, slowly but surely.
During Emma's deep quest for love I felt for her. She is a hopeless romantic in search of passion and a reciprocated love. I feel as if Emma did not care enough to see the love that she did have for Charles until the very end of the novel.
Emma becomes obsessed with all that is involved with an outside man, whether it be the Viscounts cigar holder or Rodolphe's portrait. I must admit that I despised Emma for evolving into such an irrational wife and mother. It seemed as if her search for love made her heartless in the end.
There is something in this novel that keeps the reader attached. Maybe it is Flaubert's sarcasm, or maybe to some they can identify with Emma and hear search for a greater meaning of life and love. For me I was drawn by Charles, and the conclusion to his life and what he would learn about Emma's past. I was greatly suprised by my interest in such a romantic novel. For me, Charles kept the story sauntering on.
My only dislike of the novel was the ending. We are lead through a long-winded last twenty pages only to find our two polarised lovers at the end of the line. The ending is climatic, however, I felt as if something were missing. What happened to Berthe, and Rodolphe? Charles died an uphappy man with a broken spirit, and a tattered heart. But in the end he died peacefully, like a broken man should.
The ending for Emma, is great. She was too busy unintentionally breaking Charles's heart, but in the end only her is smashed to pieces.
Madame Bovary is a wonderful romantic fantasy. We spiral through the pages feeling for both Mr. and Mrs. Bovary, and up until their last breathes we are right there with them.
Rating: 
Summary: A superbly written downer
Review: If you can't stand anything but happy endings, just skip this book and move on to the next aisle. I'm not going to spoil it for you (some other reviewers have inadvertently done it anyway), but you may as well know going in that the plot and main characters of this novel are tragic in nature. In provincial France, Charles Bovary falls in love with and marries the beautiful Emma. But the problem is that he's such a "nice guy" and Emma wants to have fun, wants to be dominated to some extent. Emma quickly discovers that she's married to a man she doesn't love and never will. In fact she despises him because he dotes on her so much, never gets upset with her, does whatever she wants, etc. She wonders why she ever married him. What's wrong with having fun? Well, there's fun and then there's fun. The solution? Escape into adultery of course. She has secret affairs with a couple men who are more than eager to indulge her wild fantasies. With one she hatches a plan to run away to Italy. To the other she pays weekly visits where they fool around all day in an expensive hotel room. She commits this adultery practically right under her poor husband's nose, yet he suspects nothing because he thinks she returns his love. She buys fancy clothes to make herself irresistible and expensive gifts for her lovers. She continually upgrades the furniture in her house with items well beyond her husband's means. All because she read a few too many romance novels as a teen and wished to be like the women in them. You know: high society, dances, men all over her, reckless lovemaking with abandon, etc. No you won't get explicit descriptions of sex in this book (it was written in the late 1800s). The sex is largely implicit, with only one scene that I recall where she actually rips her clothes off and jumps on her lover. You might come to despise Charles too, like Emma did, because he's so *blind* to what's going on. But you know what's amazing about this novel? You'll actually feel sorry for Emma too. Despite the fact that her actions are to blame for *everything*, you'll still sympathize with her. I'm not exactly sure how Flaubert managed that, but it's the main reason I give Madame Bovary the high rating I do... It's a fairly quick and easy read, only 300 pages or so. Some of the imagery is incredible, I often felt like I was an observer in the setting described. I read the Penguin translation, which is endnoted to explain many of the unfamiliar concepts and to translate the names of French novels or works of art etc that some of the characters refer to. I don't know, maybe the original French version is even more powerful, but the Penguin translation is very potent. And poignant too; the more emotionally pliant of you may actually shed a tear or two. Very highly recommended for fans of classics!
Rating:
Summary: Timeless Literature
Review: Emma is like many women today who are in loveless, passionless, sexless marriages. Her husband is wonderful, kind, and quite boooring.
The first time they make love...Emma was expecting fireworks, the earth to shake...after all, this is how it was described in the books she had read, but what she got was a quick 5 minute bit of nothing. "Is this Passion?" Emma continues asking as her husband is having sex with her...him having sex with her, not her having sex with him. (There is a difference) So what does a woman do? She takes a lover, maybe two. She finds the passion someplace else, with someone else. She becomes a disgrace. A whore. "I feel no remorse, no guilt. I feel nothing."
Emma says this more than once. I think she feels too much. Feels so deeply that she could never be satisfyed with her husband or anyone like him. After she has been with her first lover, Emma says,
"The heavens have been torn open and passion has spilt everywhere." Her lover says, "I want to make your blood sing in your veins like a river of milk."
WOW!!! Passion, sex, desire, appetite, craving, lust, and want. We all long for that, don't we? But would we do as Emma did? Thinking and doing are two different things. Emma does and does and does. And doesn't give anything back... I hated her for her selfishness, weakness, her undisciplined life, for the death that she chose so freely.
But at the same time, understood her inspite of her sins.
Rating:
Summary: The Apogee of the French Novel . . . At Least Until Marcel
Review: Let's begin with Nabokov's "Lectures on Literature," where he introduces "Madame Bovary" as follows: "The book is concerned with adultery and contains situations and allusions that shocked the prudish philistine government of Napoleon III. Indeed, the novel was actually tried in a court of justice for obscenity. Just imagine that. As if the work of an artist could ever be obscene." Written over a five-year period, "Madame Bovary" was published serially in a magazine in 1856 where, despite editorial attempts to purge it of offensive material, it was cited for "offenses against morality and religion." Fortunately, Flaubert won his case and "Madame Bovary" remains to this day one of the masterpieces of French and world literature. Indeed, in Nabokov's view, the novel's influence is notable: "Without Flaubert, there would have been no Marcel Proust in France, no James Joyce in Ireland. Chekhov in Russia would not have been quite Chekhov." The story of Emma Bovary is well known and uncomplicated. Set in the provincial towns of Tostes and Yonville (it is subtitled "Patterns of Provincial Life"), with adulterous interludes in Rouen, "Madame Bovary" narrates the life of Charles Bovary and Emma Rouault. Charles, an "officier de sante"--a licensed medical practitioner without a medical degree--meets Emma while tending to her injured father. Charles is married at that time to the first Madame Bovary, also called Madame Dubuc, a widow and thin, ugly woman who dominates the mild-mannered Charles from the very beginning. "It was his wife [Madame Dubuc] who ruled: in front of company he had to say certain things and not others, he had to eat fish on Friday, dress the way she wanted, obey her when she ordered him to dun nonpaying patients. She opened his mail, watched his every move, and listened through the thinness of the wall when there were women in his office." When Madame Dubuc dies a few short years after their marriage, it appears that Charles is fortunate, for he is not only freed from the shrewish oppression of his wife, but enabled to court and marry the beautiful Emma. It is the eight-year marriage of Charles and Emma that embodies the tale of "Madame Bovary," a tale marked by Emma's ennui, her dissatisfaction with the unsatisfied yearnings of bourgeois marriage in a small provincial town, her steadily growing sensual insatiability, her adulteries with a series of men. It is this marriage, too, that gives us one of literature's great cuckolds, Charles Bovary. "Madame Bovary" has often been described as a realistic novel and, insofar as it tells a seemingly ordinary tale of sensual longing and adultery while, at the same, time depicting characters and sensibilities typical of bourgeois, philistine rural France during the reign of Louis Phillipe, it is grimly realistic. It is also, however, a deeply psychological novel, one in which Flaubert brilliantly probes the feelings, the sensations, the romantic longings and dreamscapes of Emma Bovary. Above all, "Madame Bovary" is the apogee of the French novel prior to Proust's Parnassian achievement, a novel whose poetic language and artistic rendering transcend mere narrative and elevate Flaubert's work to that of high literary art, a novel for the ages. Read it in the original French if you can; if not, then read it in Frances Steegmuller's outstanding English translation.
Rating:
Summary: "I am Bovary!"
Review: The above is a quote by Flaubert when asked how he conceptualized a woman so well. With such classic, I often wonder how to review them, a thousand minds, finer and baser than mine have written and spoken on them so I can only speak as a writer to what touches me.
The form of finding a unisexual voice as a writer. My work was often praised for its' ability to transverse, transcend, or transform with simple intonation from male to female to female to male. I had yet to find many writers who I felt did so without a denegrating tone to the feminine or an absurdist to the masculine but when recommended Flaubert by Prof. Raymond Federman, a writer of esteem of experiemental literature, I had to jump in, no? Flaubert achieves the balance, the intonation of harmonious tones that make Bovary live. Her fall from grace, her collapse to infidelity out of spite, loneliness, boredom, isolation, sexual awakening is fraught with the peril of public scorn. Adultery these days is TV fodder, so commonplace that I wonder in mature relationships if one actually expects it. But Flaubert wisely chose to question it from the point of the guilty in a world where guilt was tantamont to self-destruction. Bovary breathes as if written by a woman, though I feel such a statement is what undermines literature. Bovary breathes because she was written by a writer not obsessed with his gender or sexuality of even the societal mores that he was challenging. Again Flaubert should be read with a guide if a classroom setting is not available but it shouldnt be abandoned because of age or nationality. There is a sense that the romanticism attached to the conventional French image is being challenged here by burgeoning feminine sexuality. And at the same time I admire Flaubert for being a WRITER and not a gender in his craft.
Rating:
Summary: Best Edition for College Papers
Review: This is the best edition I know of for writing college papers. Besides having the text of the novel it is full of critical essays and useful material for analyzing the classic.
Rating:
Summary: Makes you think, well worth reading
Review: Madame Bovary is a story about a common woman who marries an ordinary husband living an unglamorous middle-class life in a provincial town. It's that realistic. The heroine, Emma Bovary, longs for the wealth, romance, and adventure she finds in the Romantic novels of her time. After her marriage to Charles, a second class doctor, and moving to a small, mediocre town, she finds her life full of routine and banaltiy. She rebels, and seeks to satisfy her desires for a more glamorous life. This leads her to adultery and financial difficulties, which both lead to tragic consequences. Emma Bovary is a character you will either despise for her actions or sympathise with and understand. It is true, her actions bring misfortune to her family, especially her husband Charles. Although he is weak and unambitious, lacking the gallantry of her image of a lover, his sentiments for her are genuine and she fails to see it. Moreover, he so trusts and admires her and never sees through her deception. I find that he is the character, if not most interesting, then most tragic and worthy of sympathy, as he becomes the true victim. As for Emma, like her or hate her, she is one who many will relate to. This is not an exciting read, not fast paced or action-packed. Still, the messages in the book will reward your efforts. I'm no expert on Romantic novels but I think it's quite unlike other novels of it's time. Flaubert's descriptions and use of language are very moving, sometimes disturbing, especially when describing the ravages of sickness or pain. Those who like to contemplate on moral ideas in a literary work, or who love the beauty of language for the sake of it will enjoy this book very much.
Rating:
Summary: Still relevant
Review: I think that this book is still very relevant today. I know far too many women who, when they realize that life is not all hearts and flowers, become very bitter and self destructive. They, like Emma, look for other men or other means (not good ones) to give them that romantic rush. This is very much a morality tale. Read it and learn.
|
