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Summary: Literary equivalent of watching an accident on the freeway
Review: There aren't many surprises in Madame Bovary. Everything that you think is going to happen to the characters pretty much does. Emma's fate and that of her lapdog husband Charles are written in quickly drying cement from the first few chapters. All you can really do is sit back and watch with the sick fascination of an ambulance chaser as their unrelenting boredom, sadness, and unfulfilled dreams suck them swirling to their predestined ends.And yet, this book provides much more than a good wallowing session. Madame Bovary is one of the best written novels I've ever read. Flaubert is a brilliant writer. The characters are so alive in their death-in-life dance that you can't help but sharply feel their pain and see how they might have lived their lives differently. Madame Bovary is a classic of French literature, but it also speaks to our modern condition in an uncanny way. Anyone searching for meaning in their life will relate to the pains and struggles of these characters. If you've been thinking about reading this (I had it waiting on my shelf for about a decade) wait no longer. Read this remarkable novel now.
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Summary: Simple Plot, Elaborate Details in this Masterpiece
Review: A simple story really: Charles Bovary, an insensitive, crude, socially awkward oaf, sleazes his way into the medical profession and becomes a doctor in small French provinces at the danger of the citizenry. Additionally, Charles marries a young, beautiful woman, Emma, who intoxicated on romance novels, expects her marriage to Charles to be as grand and splendid as the romances she has gorged on all her life. As one would expect, her marriage is hellish, isolating, and frustrating; Emma grows more and more irritable with her husband and looks to allay her frustrations by spending beyond her means and by engaging in affairs with fops, charlatans, and other mountebanks who seduce Emma with the illusions of romance she has read in her novels. Her growing debts and growing disillusionment with her lovers reaches a climax that I'll save for the reader. The novel's plot is actually a vehicle for Flaubert's real agenda: to skewer the vulgarities and pettiness of the middle-class. He shows no mercy and is rather misanthropic in his portrayal of his characters. Nevertheless, his vision is a true and vigorous one. This is not a novel for people who want to sit back and enjoy a French period piece romance. To the contrary, this novel kills romance and in fact Flaubert was once dubbed "The Hang-Man of the Romantics."
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Summary: utterly boring and bland
Review: When I started reading this book for school, I thought I had already read some really banal books, but this has to top them all. It is so eeriely similar to the Awakening that I found myself subconciously comparing them at every possible chance. Emma's actions are so close to Edna's that the two women seem like they should have been born sisters. The way that they treat their husbands and the responses they receive are almost indentical. What I find so irksome is the way that Emma refuses to see through her thick mind the consequences of her actions. Unlike Edna, Emma completely ruins her child's life along with her husband's. This tale seemed like the exemplary tale of a woman's scandelous attempts to find love from page 100 and Flaubert manages to drag the story on for 300 more pages. There should be no pity for the "heroine" Emma, only a wish that she should have received her true comeuppance.
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Summary: A tragic lesson in unrealistic expectations
Review: Emma Bovary, like many of us, was raised on fairy tales in which the young woman is carried off dramatically by the handsome, charming, kind prince who sees her not for what she is, but for what she may become. But Emma marries a man, not a prince, and a rather dull man at that -- and the life she believes she could have led tantalizes her to the point of madness. A tragic story of one woman's downward spiral in pursuit of the prince of her dreams, who doesn't, and will never, exist.
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Summary: More fun than you expect
Review: "Madame Bovary" is of course THE classic novel of adultery (together with "Anna Karenina"), and it is also on of the most-respected representatives of 19th-century realism; that might be enough to deter many readers, which is a pity, because "Madame Bovary", is, above all, an excellent read. As the subtitle "Scences from provincial life" suggests, the novel is a brilliant satire of small town life. In contrast to Dickens or Thackerey, however, Flaubert's sense of humour is excessively grim and merciless. His insight does not lead him to excuse any of the weaknesses of his protagonists. Mr Bovary is a decent chap, a doctor of mediocre talent and intelligence. A kind of misunderstanding leads the daughter of one of his patients to marry him. All to soon, alas, she recognizes that ther romantic ambitions will not be fulfilled. Her two affairs are presented as a story of moral decay. In the end her trusting and doting husband still has not found out what is going on, but unfortunately Madame has ruined the family financially. The story in itself is not exciting, but Flaubert is a master at depicting the expressions of Madame's ambitions and Monsieurs naivety - and the ruthless machinations of the pharmacist who claims to be working for progress in the spirit of Voltaire. It will take you some time to recover from facing up to this dark vision of humankind, but Flaubert's precision, black humour and masterful storytelling make reading this book a very entertaining experience!
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Summary: Incredibly Depressing
Review: Self destruction is a terrible thing to witness, but Flaubert's style is unreal. Must read.
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Summary: Dull, Dry, and Utterly Loathsome
Review: Madame Bovary was perhaps the worst book I have ever read in my life. I'm sure when it was written it showed a scandalous look into the life of a French house wife, but it has no relevance to modern life. Not only was the main character bitter, depressing and loathsome, but the drab and dull look into the French country side was almost enough to put me to sleep. I only trudged through the book in hopes that there would be a spectacular ending to make up for the slow pace and repetitive nature of the book, but alas, I was wrong. For I was greeted with a heinous ending that was not only unremarkable, but even more disappointing as the book itself. There was no obvious point to the book, although a deeper look did show the moral. Unless you have nothing better to do with you life, I recommend that you skip this so-called "classic." For no matter what language you read it in, Madame Bovary is tres horrible!
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Summary: Flaubert on Flaubert
Review: As well fed as he was on French culture Flaubert rarely wrote about anyone resembling himself or the high cultural atmosphere of which he was a part. He was a man who had incredible insight into himself(read Sentimental Education)and yet he chose to write about people who had very little insight into themselves. Madame Bovary is a highly polished piece of work with only one major flaw which is the inconsistent narration(the story is first told by Emma's husband but then abandons him). Flaubert writes scene after scene which feels just right and you begin to be enthralled by it. The France of Madame Bovary is a backwater country town of no import and Madame Bovary is just another member of an inconsequential set of beings, and yet we are intrigued by this woman and the village and its population of minor characters. Flaubert's greatness is that he makes her seem important to us despite her humble station in life and her ridiculous questing for true love. Ah, perhaps that is what Flaubert saw in this character, his own romantic longing which would never be satisfied. But by using a common character such as Emma pitted against an equally common setting to explore his own romanticism he shows all the more clearly to himself his own tragedy(and the tragedy of all romantics), which is the recogntion that the romantic take on life is an aberrant one which sits uncomfortably among the very set laws of cold nature. So what we have here is a romantic dissecting himself and the effect is unmistakable. A moving kind of self knowledge rarely encountered, a hidden confession. The incompetent doctor who performs an incompetent surgery on the peasants mal formed foot supports an already subtly felt feeling that life despite the news of the day that the enlightenment has arrived is no easy friend to reason either. I suppose this is a work of social realism or it could be called one but whatever you call it the story exerts a strong appeal. Perhaps because it is such a completely told story, meaning Flaubert seems to have looked at Emma from every conceivable angle and the scenes are each very rich with the main theme and the minor themes complementing each other. Flaubert seems to have been able to look at his romanticism with his reason and vice versa. A struggle which is at the very heart of literature.
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Summary: Graffiti found on the white wall: Flaubert + Emma
Review: This novel, contrary to the expressed wishes of Flaubert, falls somewhat short of the austere, visceral, thoughtless beauty the author admired so much upon beholding a bare white wall on the Acropolis. He wanted "Madame Bovary" to be that wall: sustained by the beauty of its purity and existence alone, undefiled by the sheer messiness of ideas and feelings. Though this book inaugurated not so much a style, but the ascendance of style itself as the novel's primary raison d'etre (thankfully giving us in the process James, Conrad, Joyce, Faulkner, Nabokov, Delillo, and just about every other author with any claim to the dubious labels of either modernism or post-modernism), "Madame Bovary" encloses its own glorious failure at this purely stylistic self-containment. A novel, or, for that matter, any work of literary art, contra "Seinfeld," cannot be about nothing, cannot express nothing; this simple story of a sensual, romance-intoxicated, and frequently unkind philistine women's adulterous relations in a small French town which bores and repulses her has several points to make, ideas to suggest, along the way, the aesthetic equivalent of obscene graffiti on the pristine white wall. Flaubert admitted in correspondence that his characters disgusted him, and, as critic James Wood notes, the author's disgust is palpable until the very last line. Flaubert's tone, straining throughout toward an objectivity it never quite reaches, bespeaks his quite entertaining condescencion toward the people in the story (excepting Emma) as well as his contempt for their artless, pathetic lifestyles. His relation toward Emma is a more complex affair than this however, and more complex than Flaubert's own comment ("Madame Bovary--c'est moi") would suggest: as a person, he would like to mock and disparage her as easily as he does her lover Rodolphe or the town's obnoxious, successful pharamacist Homais, and as a writer, he would like to simply record her dispassionately. However, both author and man love Emma and want to make love to her. When it succeeds, Flaubert's stated project--to center beauty in style alone--renders a frigid reading experience, though we must be grateful than its influence provided us with such diverse marvels as Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," Nabokov's "Lolita," and Delillo's "The Body Artist." But this novel is not all frigid, because its beauty is often centered in Emma, and in Flaubert's feeling of love toward her. We do not read to encounter a blank wall, and we would put down this book if that was what we found erected within its pages; finding love, however, we read on.
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Summary: Emma Bovary is closer than you think. (Check the mirror.)
Review: It's amusing to read the few negative reviews of this book. One wonders what the readers would possibly consider GOOD literature! As soon as I finished reading it the first time, I promptly started again from the beginning - something I've never done before. The bare plot is deliberately banal. It's Flaubert's execution, his insight into some of the more complex aspects of human nature and society, and the creation of Emma that mark this as one of the finest (and most engrossing) novels ever written. What makes Emma tick is perhaps more relevant to our own culture and society - revolving, as it does, so entirely around consumerism, escapist entertainments and a credit-based economy - than it was even to Flaubert's. And I have to wonder about anyone who could get through this book and miss that point entirely. To be sure, Emma is an extreme case - but there are plenty like her walking around. (I even saw myself in her, to some extent.) The syndrome is common, but seldom described as lucidly as here. I can see Emma, Mastercard in her hot little hand, fitting right into contemporary American society.
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