Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics)
The notorious and celebrated novel that established modern realism
For this novel of French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, Flaubert invented a paradoxically original and wholly modern style. His heroine, Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. A succès de scandale in its day, Madame Bovary remains a powerful and scintillating novel.
This Penguin Classics edition is translated with notes and an introduction by Geoffrey Wall. It includes a preface by Michele Roberts.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
For this novel of French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, Flaubert invented a paradoxically original and wholly modern style. His heroine, Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. A succès de scandale in its day, Madame Bovary remains a powerful and scintillating novel.
This Penguin Classics edition is translated with notes and an introduction by Geoffrey Wall. It includes a preface by Michele Roberts.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Community Reviews
Despite my obsession with the classics, this is the first time I've read this book. Overall, it is a well-written, interesting story, although I find Emma to be insufferable. I understand that she is a repressed woman of her time, but that does not excuse her behavior--her husband loved her and did all he could to make her comfortable and happy, his only crime was being boring (in her eyes.) Not to mention the fact that she was a terrible mom (when she pushed Berthe--omg!)
I would still recommend reading this book, it's a good story and really illustrates the atmosphere of provincial French middle class life, but Emma is, in my opinion, an insufferable main character. But that's also part of what makes the story interesting!
I didn't think much of the book after, but then a day or two later it really struck me. I really like how Madame Bovary is not just a tragic figure, not one to pity. She can be sympathetic, so lost and impacted by the world around her. Seen and unseen. Madame Bovary, c'est moi!
The drama! Let this be a lesson to all you ladies who read too many romance novels, indulge in the latest fashion trends, live beyond their means, and don’t attend to their feminine duties- lest they befall the same fate!
No but forreal, this holds up to modern trash dramas and I am lovin’ it
The book looks very simple, but it has a lot to say. it has a lot of symbols that at first you may not get it, but later you will understand. each of the characters other that being a human, resemble a trait or changes in our interaction with world. for example a blind beggar resembles ugly side of life and mirrors the psychological condition of Emma Bovary that exists but she did not like to see, or the seller that makes the Bovary family go on debt is very similar to the issue we all encounter in our modern life when we get a mortgage.
The book is trying to inform us that some times the reality of the life is not what you read in books or what you hear in the news.
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