Madame Bovary (Oxford World's Classics)

Madame Bovary is one of those rare books that changes the way you look at literature and, perhaps, at life. It is not a consoling or escapist read; it is a totalizing, uncomfortable, necessary aesthetic and intellectual experience. The 4 stars are not a rating, but an acknowledgment: we are faced with one of the absolute peaks of the art of narrative. A novel perfect in its crudeness and in its bitter, unsurpassable beauty.

I loved this novel, the language, the story. However, Madame Bovary's ennui was contagious and I found myself drifting off every now and then. And it wasn't her boring husband that got to me, it was her incessant need to be entertained in a manner and treated above her station as a member of the bourgeoisie. I found her ambition off putting and sad.

At times I felt myself pitying certain characters, annoyed at others, but M. Flaubert knows how to weave a good story and kept me engaged enough to finish the novel.