Flaubert himself gave the book two titles. The first, MADAME BOVARY, is Emma, a beautiful convent-educated bourgeoise who, growing up reading nothing but Romantic literature, expects real life to match. Marrying a devoted but prosaic husband, she seeks solace where she can find it, with predictably tragic results. It is a beautifully anti-romantic object lesson in the dangers of romanticism, told with a sexual frankness which shocked its original readers, but which now inevitably seems a little tame.
But this sordid plot is contained in a novel that is satirical, even comic, portraying the complex pettiness inherent in the book's second title, PROVINCIAL LIVES. Flaubert hilariously counterpoints Emma's first steps towards adultery, for instance, with the speechifying of some petty functionary at an agricultural fair. In addition to Emma's mediocre doctor husband Charles, and her two lovers (the infatuated Léon and the libertine Rodolphe), the author includes many peripheral characters who together make up a portrait of small-town society, from the self-aggrandizing apothecary Homais to the draper and usurious money-lender Lheureux. But Flaubert can also temper his satirical edge in magnificent descriptions of scenes ranging from a village market to a provincial opera performance. [While I am in no position to say if the Penguin translation by Geoffrey Wall is better or worse than the others available, it is certainly good enough to give me much enjoyment in these passages, and is faithful to the French text of those sections that I have compared.]
Though tied to a particular place and time, the social and commercial elements of the story come across with startling modernity. It is, as I say, a little difficult to recapture the physical eroticism that so shocked its original readers, but its psychological aspect is still acute. Indeed, whether fully-fleshed or sketched in, the psychology of Flaubert's characters always rings true. For all that, Flaubert always has the air of writing from the outside, even when talking about Emma. The result is to show a story of decline that is all too plausible, and which leaves one helpless to intervene. The Bovary story may end in tragedy, but the provincial comedy that contains it continues unruffled on its petty course.
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Reviews with images
This edition/printing is not recommended
I did get a refund. This is the worst edition of any book I've ever seen. The typeface is so tiny it's just unreadable. Also on the title page, after noting the translator, is the statement: Adapted by Ariel Fernandez C. So I question whether this is the true Gustave Flaubert work.
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