Rereading with my daughter, which is very fun. I haven't read this book since college, but it's just as moving, beautiful and painful. We're having lots of interesting discussions about what Emma Bovary could have done to address her ennui. ( )

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A woman stuck inside an over-rigid culture, coming to a bad end. ( )

I'm giving this a 5 star review and it may well be the finest book I've ever read, in spite of (or maybe because of) how difficult I found it as an actual experience emotionally. It can be extremely difficult to interact with a work of art where one character seems to capture so much of yourself, in both the positive and the negative sense, what you are and what you aspire to be in a more ideal form; even more so when it's a tale as tragic as this one, where it feels like watching a version of yourself be destroyed (and if this doesn't make it obvious; Madame Bovary, c'est moi). The first part of this book filled me with interest and wonderment at Flaubert's fluid prose, surprisingly minimal by 19th century standards but also so sublime and beautiful in its more fantastic passages, words composed with such wonder and precision that they feel at turns like they were carrying me away; the second part with anxiety knowing the ruin to which Emma's love affairs were leading her while understanding completely; and the third part knocked me sick to my stomach with sadness, the debts mounting, her life collapsing around her and all her dreams defiled one by one until her death and the demise of all those around her (an extra bitter pill when taken with the fact that the most detestable characters, i.e. Homais, Lheureux etc. are the ones who prosper in the end - but such is a social order where such mediocrities flourish). Fully understanding that Emma is a deeply flawed character in so many ways, to me this is a Romanticist tragedy where her fate was practically preordained - one can only hope that in her choice of death over final humiliation and escape from the cruelties of the temporal world she found the transcendence denied her in life, the "azure land" of her fantasies*. A soul-scalding ordeal I can't get out of my head (in the best possible way) and a marvel of literature - would that I could write with a tenth the human empathy, scorn, humour, understanding and eloquence that Flaubert did.

*I understand the common interpretation seems to be of this novel as a critique of romanticism but I feel like this is a somewhat superficial reading by itself which misses so much of how entwined Flaubert's own personality is with this, despite his protestations to the contrary; I agree with Baudelaire/Sartre on Emma as a heroic figure to a good degree, though not entirely with their reasoning as to why. May elaborate further in a future re-review but I'm still trying to process everything I went through in reading this and all the impressions and thoughts it left with me. ( )

[I read the Wall translation, so maybe blame that for my low rating if you disagree with my review.]

I did not especially enjoy this book. I found the tone rather cold and intellectual. Yeah, I know there's a lot of irony in there which is supposed to be distancing, but it wasn't making any interesting points. And irony needs the saving grace of humour or it just gets heavy and bleak; the humour in this book mostly seems to consist of the author saying "check out these idiots!" again and again. He's so busy sneering at Emma Bovary's dreams that he fails to acknowledge what a wonderful time she's probably having shagging her way around the French countryside. The problems the characters experience are hardly situated in the bourgeoisie, nor Emma's attempts to transcend the strictures of her position.

Flaubert seems to have contempt for all of the characters, which means I'm forced to spend three hundred pages in the company of contemptible individuals. He tortures them all in various ways, which he implies they all deserve, and then dispenses with them when their travails are no longer relevant to the point he's trying to make. The way characters just disappear from the novel when he's tired of mocking them shows that for him this is not a story so much as a kind of performance. I do love some books in that mode, but when they're in translation it can feel like having a joke retold by someone who's doesn't share your sense of humour. Or maybe the joke just wasn't that funny.

Or maybe the joke was misogynist. I haven't chased up any feminist readings of Madame Bovary yet, but I didn't trust any of Flaubert's very detailed representation of her thoughts. Are women just dumb, overly sentimental men? Not in my experience, nor in the experience of Flaubert's contemporaries like George Eliot.

I'm tempted to come back to this book in the future in a different translation because it's so famous. But then Charles Dickens is very famous and I have hated the experience of reading him. ( )