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3.0 

Madame Bovary

By Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

Madame Bovary, often ranked among the greatest novels of all time, is Flaubert’s first novel, and considered to be both his masterpiece and one of the most influential works in literary history, with authors from Henry James to Proust to Nabokov heaping it with praise.

The novel tells the story of Emma Bovary, a commoner wife of a country doctor, and her attempts to escape the drudgery of day-to-day mediocrity by engaging in adulterous affairs and overspending on luxuries. She remains unsatisfied even though her husband adores her and they want for little, and her shallowness eventually leads to their ruin.

The story was first serialized in Revue de Paris, where prosecutors tried to have it censored for obscenity, arguing that not only is the story immoral, but that realism as a literary style is an offence against art and decency. The trial only served to increase the story’s fame, and when it was published as a single novel it quickly became a bestseller.

The novel is groundbreaking in its emphasis on the psychological and emotional lives of its characters. Literature up to then had mostly focusing on the external events that make characters react, instead of focusing on the internal thought processes of those characters. Madame Bovary changed that forever. It was also revolutionary in its criticism of the middle class, which at the time was a still-new social class vying for elbow room between the working poor and hereditary aristocracy. Flaubert critiqued the middle class as being ambitious, shallow, greedy, materialistic, and totally without culture; Emma’s burning desire to reach even higher social strata, contrasted against that satisfaction being fundamentally denied to her by her middle-class nature, is an early echo of Marx’s theory of alienation in industrial societies.

Today Madame Bovary, with its careful but charming description of the banality of everyday life, is considered the first great example of literary realism in fiction novels. Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s translation, though over a hundred years old, is remarkably fresh and smooth, and is a pleasure even for modern readers.

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1955 Reviews

3.0
Thumbs Up“It's aite. I didn't like Emma, don't hate me 😂 Charles is what we all want, faithful and loyal. Emma reminds me of all the women obsessed with romace novels fantasizing over unrealistic male characters lol. The ending is great 👏”
Believable charactersBeautifully writtenComicalRomanticThought-provoking
Surprised Face with Open Mouth
Multi-layered charactersBeautifully writtenAddictiveBeautiful settingImmersive settingHeartbreakingRomantic
Expressionless Face
RomanticUnengaging characters
Thinking Face
Multi-layered charactersBeautifully writtenRomanticThought-provokingRacismUnengaging characters
Smiling Face with Heart-Eyes“It is hard to catch why I enjoyed this book as much as I did, but I just devoured it. I couldn't stop thinking that although Emma Bovary made huge mistakes and was by no means a 'good' person, society failed her in a way, as she went from learning in a convent to getting married without any life experience to base decisions on (not that she had that many choices). I know that it is mostly because of the times this novel was written, but as a modern reader it is astonishing, how little freedom women had in the 19th century.”
Believable charactersDescriptive writingAddictiveRealistic settingRomanticThought-provoking

About Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert (UK: 12 December 1821 – 8 May 1880) was a French novelist. Highly influential, he has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country. According to the literary theorist Kornelije Kvas, "in Flaubert, realism strives for formal perfection, so the presentation of reality tends to be neutral, emphasizing the values and importance of style as an objective method of presenting reality". He is known especially for his debut novel Madame Bovary (1857), his Correspondence, and his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert. On the occasion of Flaubert's 198th birthday (12 December 2019), a group of researchers at CNRS published a neural language model under his name.

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