Book Review: “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert
Discovering a Classic
Earlier this year, I reviewed an essay collection by Karl Ove Knausgaard titled In the Land of the Cyclops. That book features an essay on the mid-19th century French novel Madame Bovary, which Knausgaard called a “perfect” book. (I recently read a review of Madame Bovary online in The Toronto Star, which seemed to indicate that this wasn’t the first or only time that the book was called “perfect.”) Based on that assertion, I got curious and picked up a translation by American novelist Lydia Davis that is now in its 20th printing. (So, I’m guessing that it’s a good translation as a result.) However, I’m a little chaffed at Knausgaard because he wound up spoiling the ending of the novel in his essay — but I suppose that you can’t spoil a 167-year-old blockbuster, especially when it has been as oft-filmed as this book has. Still, you must be careful and put in spoiler alerts where necessary at the risk of ruining something for other people. After all, if you want someone to read a “perfect” novel, why ruin the ending?
In any event, Madame Bovary is the story of a country woman named Emma — who has married into the Bovary family, which is about as lower-middle class as they come, even though her new husband Charles is a doctor (he’s of a lower class because he seemingly can’t get patients to pay him and he flunked his first attempt at med school). At first, she is delighted by her marriage, but when she gets the opportunity to go to a party held by the upper crust of French society, she realizes how much she hungers for adventure and the world, and suddenly feels confined by her matrimonial bed. She embarks on two affairs — one to a clerk, and another to a wealthy landowner. However, even though her husband remains oblivious to this (and Flaubert peppers his text with suggestions that other people knew what was going on behind his back), Emma gets more and more reckless with her spending. To the point where, well, tragedy ensues — and that’s all I say. But for all the book’s sadness and coldness of character, there’s a great deal of humour to be had here as well. For instance, when Emma and one of her lovers need to find a private place to have a tryst, they chose a carriage that wanders through the streets of the city where the two have met up. (Remarkably, Flaubert got away with this in the end — and, yes, I know that he was still persecuted but acquitted by the authorities for writing an immoral novel.)
The reason why Madame Bovary might be described as “perfect” is because this ground-breaking novel — considered to be the first “realist” or objective work of long fiction, thus making this the forerunner to today’s literary fiction — is because the language is so floral. I wonder what the original French must read like, but Davis’ translation is largely beautiful and easy to read. It is said that Flaubert would spend a week on a particular page of the text — revising it and rewriting it wholesale until the prose sang like poetry. That attention to craft shows. Plot-wise, though, the book is a little slow until the novel’s final third, which gathers itself up with the ferocity of a tidal wave. Still, that language makes this the sort of thing that you might have to re-read a few times just to pick up on all the nuances of what the book is trying to say.
The other striking thing about this work is that it is, in many ways, a proto-feminist novel. Emma struggles with being a barefoot and pregnant housewife who yearns for something more. Doesn’t that sound like a first-wave feminist to you? It does to me. The thing that struck me is how few women populate this novel. Aside from Emma, the next major female character is an innkeeper — but we don’t see her often and she doesn’t do anything to forward the plot of this book. Emma Bovary is a woman who lives in the kingdom of men, and the book shows us the consequences of that “upbringing.” Having grown up in a monastery, Emma is cloistered and can only dream of a better life — the type of life that one might find in grand romance novels.
Is Madame Bovary a “perfect” book? I’m not sure, but I did enjoy it. I think the novel suffers a bit from breaking the show, don’t tell rule of writing. Flaubert likes to tell and tell and tell, and there’s very little dialogue in the first two-thirds of this novel. That can make for a bit of a slog of a read at times. However, this is a book that yields treasures if you manage to stick with it. It is not a difficult book to read, but it is a different book to read to those with 21st-century sensibilities. However, there’s a lot that Flaubert’s masterpiece has in common with books of today: he drops in references to things pop culture-y in his day in this work. It may be helpful to read the notes at the end of Davis’ translation, except that there’s no footnoting in the novel itself — which makes looking up references to certain things a challenge. I wound up going to the dictionary online to find out what “curé” meant. (It has little to do with finding a treatment for what ails you thanks to the accent on that e. To give it away, it’s a priest.) In any event, Madame Bovary is a fascinating work and one that has me craving to start reading more of what’s considered to be classic novels. You might see a couple more of these types of reviews in this space, time pending (I have a day job now and the books sent blindly by publicists keep on piling up). I think that says a lot when you can read a book that’s more than 150 years old and find that it has something relevant about it. I guess that’s what makes this a “classic” even though it may or may not be a “perfect” read. I’m glad for the reminder that books like this exist, spoilers be damned, that’s for sure. This was kind of fun as an intellectual exercise.
Lydia Davis’ translation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was published by Penguin Classics on October 4, 2011.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
