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3.51 AVERAGE
3.51 AVERAGE
emotional
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This might get 2 stars from me for the sole reason that it's old, therefore the cultural context is SO different from today that the story becomes interesting only because of it's Victorian quirks. I'm not feeling that generous at the moment, so it's a 1 star.
I don’t really know where to start with this review. Like I said, I mostly find this book interesting because it’s old. Since the premise of the book was a social commentary, and additionally now that everything is so dated, there’s a lot to unpack in the world of Madame Bovary. Emma says a few times to her lover(s) that they are free and so lucky to be able to do what they want. I think this is an incredibly nuanced view for a man to have in the 1850’s: to recognize and then iterate that women have fundamentally different lives and expectations placed upon them compared to men. Of course, the male characters completely miss her nuance and go on about how “she is also free because she goes out and does/buys what she wants” or how “some men also have it difficult sometimes.” But Emma’s point is that women are constricted to their husbands and are only allowed to do so much, whereas men are free to do “whatever”.
We see this most clearly through the Bovary men. Mr Bovary Sr. is a womanizer who disregards his own wife in favor of a string of affairs, but he gets away with it because he is a man; while Mrs Bovary is forced to just accept her husband’s adultery because she is his wife and divorce is out of the question. Charles exhibits (white) male privilege because he’s completely unqualified to be a doctor but becomes one anyways. He’s not smart enough to understand what’s going on AND he wastes like, two entire years of his education just because he can, and his parents STILL fund him and put him through medical school! He somehow graduates and goes to be a doctor in the country ‘cause I guess you can be dumb and it doesn’t matter because people in the country are POOR and therefore undeserving of appropriate medical attention. (**heavy sarcasm**) And, yknow, I was going to say that Charles is different from his father and only exhibits one aspect of male privilege not available to Emma, but that’s WRONG. Charles ALSO is unfaithful to his first wife when he meets Emma and didn’t care about the social implications of starting an affair! First wife conveniently dies so he can comfortably “move on”, but I assume if the book was about Charles he just would have started an affair and ignored his wife.
Upon writing that, I started asking myself “Hey, why did we even need that part of the story with Charles’ first wife? Couldn’t we have just started the plot with Charles marrying Emma and then going from there?” But perhaps that’s part of the social commentary. Or perhaps Charles marrying immediately after college was an expected social custom of the time that had to play out for normalcy’s sake. This isn’t relevant to the rest of my problems with the book but it crossed my mind so I included it.
Actually, maybe that’s a good segue into my main gripe with the book, which is pacing. GoD was this a slog to get through at times >.<“ Something would happen, and then we would go on and on and on about seemingly irrelevant details or have conversations between side characters I don’t know and don’t care about. And from what I can tell, long speeches by side characters about “modern” medicine didn’t add anything to the plot it was just a pain to get through. -_- It’s funny because it felt like so much happened (like, a lot of time would pass) but also nothing would happen at all! We go through Charles’ entire life up until early adulthood when he meets Emma, but we’ve only gotten through maybe 15% of the book! And I know the main character is really Emma, so I guess that makes sense, but it’s that type of pacing where an entire year will go by of Emma moaning about being lonely, which feels like it takes AGES to get through, but we’ve barely progressed in the overall plot. Does that even make sense? Basically there were a lot of times where I kind of zoned out in boredom and I felt like the action was never going anywhere.
A lot of time passes and things happen but at the same time, nothing happens.
Oh, there was also a bunch of reflections on religion that I didn’t understand. It falls into the category of “conversations between characters that I zoned out during because I 1. Don’t care and 2. Can’t follow what they’re on about” (it probably all made sense to the audience at the time but I can’t be bothered to figure it out)
I kept forgetting who the secondary characters were?? Maybe it’s because I was only hearing the names that I got them all mixed up. Plus, there’s several jobs that characters have that I really have a hard time picturing because it’s not the 1800s anymore. The “druggist”, the “chemist”, the “philosophical” medical doctor, the wet nurse, blah blah, there’s so many names and social practices that are completely foreign to me and that probably made the plot more convoluted than it actually is.
Ohhh my god, OK. So, I know Emma is all repressed and stuff in her boring marriage which makes her act out, but holy shit she’s annoying. At first I thought maybe her physical and mental health woes were pretty natural for someone in her position, and then they’re just made out to be really dramatic and strange because she’s a woman and that’s not how women are “supposed” to be (also, I’m reading this from a modern medical perspective, so someone who is “insane” in the olden times might just be afflicted by like, symptoms we recognize as anxiety or depression today). BUT. As the book went on, I kept trying to see where like, Emma’s need to just sit inside all day or feelings of wanting to die were just symptoms of major depression. Eventually though I felt like her mood swings and antics were her literally just being difficult and it was frustrating/annoying. Particularly when she’s with her lover and keeps seeing him but is bored by him but she keeps doing all this dramatic shit anyway. And maybe there’s a less common modern mental health diagnosis that would explain her actions. Or there isn’t any explanation since she’s just a character in a novel and is designed to be a foil for social commentary. Whatever it is, I got really tired of Emma by the end of the book. Especially when she kept buying things on credit and then got confused when she racked up debt and people came after her for the money. Like. Emma!!! What did you expect!! You have to pay for what you buy and if you don’t people will come after you for it!! Also: buying more and more expensive things on credit=debt, it’s not that complicated!! Ughhhhh >:(
Related to finances, it’s interesting to realize how...upper-class this book is (and it’s very 1800s upper-class where you just like, have ostrich feathers for decoration, or have “exotic” “treasures” just to ~be interesting~ (when really it’s stolen/practically stolen cultural memorabilia from places they look down upon, but that’s a whole other conversation)). I don’t have much more to say about how class operates in this book and what that means; just maybe that it all reminds me that “classic” literature is told from a very specific POV that’s most likely not wholly representative of what “the past” was really like.
Lastly, I knew this book wasn’t going to end well for Emma because classic novels never end well for “bad” women (not saying that what Emma did is commendable, but you kind of know she’s going to die a la Anna Karenina)
So, I’d accepted that she was going to die, so when that happened I wasn’t surprised or anything. But then there was like, 40min of audio left! That was a pain. She already died what else is there to say? The ending left me...mad?
I don’t really know where to start with this review. Like I said, I mostly find this book interesting because it’s old. Since the premise of the book was a social commentary, and additionally now that everything is so dated, there’s a lot to unpack in the world of Madame Bovary. Emma says a few times to her lover(s) that they are free and so lucky to be able to do what they want. I think this is an incredibly nuanced view for a man to have in the 1850’s: to recognize and then iterate that women have fundamentally different lives and expectations placed upon them compared to men. Of course, the male characters completely miss her nuance and go on about how “she is also free because she goes out and does/buys what she wants” or how “some men also have it difficult sometimes.” But Emma’s point is that women are constricted to their husbands and are only allowed to do so much, whereas men are free to do “whatever”.
We see this most clearly through the Bovary men. Mr Bovary Sr. is a womanizer who disregards his own wife in favor of a string of affairs, but he gets away with it because he is a man; while Mrs Bovary is forced to just accept her husband’s adultery because she is his wife and divorce is out of the question. Charles exhibits (white) male privilege because he’s completely unqualified to be a doctor but becomes one anyways. He’s not smart enough to understand what’s going on AND he wastes like, two entire years of his education just because he can, and his parents STILL fund him and put him through medical school! He somehow graduates and goes to be a doctor in the country ‘cause I guess you can be dumb and it doesn’t matter because people in the country are POOR and therefore undeserving of appropriate medical attention. (**heavy sarcasm**) And, yknow, I was going to say that Charles is different from his father and only exhibits one aspect of male privilege not available to Emma, but that’s WRONG. Charles ALSO is unfaithful to his first wife when he meets Emma and didn’t care about the social implications of starting an affair! First wife conveniently dies so he can comfortably “move on”, but I assume if the book was about Charles he just would have started an affair and ignored his wife.
Upon writing that, I started asking myself “Hey, why did we even need that part of the story with Charles’ first wife? Couldn’t we have just started the plot with Charles marrying Emma and then going from there?” But perhaps that’s part of the social commentary. Or perhaps Charles marrying immediately after college was an expected social custom of the time that had to play out for normalcy’s sake. This isn’t relevant to the rest of my problems with the book but it crossed my mind so I included it.
Actually, maybe that’s a good segue into my main gripe with the book, which is pacing. GoD was this a slog to get through at times >.<“ Something would happen, and then we would go on and on and on about seemingly irrelevant details or have conversations between side characters I don’t know and don’t care about. And from what I can tell, long speeches by side characters about “modern” medicine didn’t add anything to the plot it was just a pain to get through. -_- It’s funny because it felt like so much happened (like, a lot of time would pass) but also nothing would happen at all! We go through Charles’ entire life up until early adulthood when he meets Emma, but we’ve only gotten through maybe 15% of the book! And I know the main character is really Emma, so I guess that makes sense, but it’s that type of pacing where an entire year will go by of Emma moaning about being lonely, which feels like it takes AGES to get through, but we’ve barely progressed in the overall plot. Does that even make sense? Basically there were a lot of times where I kind of zoned out in boredom and I felt like the action was never going anywhere.
A lot of time passes and things happen but at the same time, nothing happens.
Oh, there was also a bunch of reflections on religion that I didn’t understand. It falls into the category of “conversations between characters that I zoned out during because I 1. Don’t care and 2. Can’t follow what they’re on about” (it probably all made sense to the audience at the time but I can’t be bothered to figure it out)
I kept forgetting who the secondary characters were?? Maybe it’s because I was only hearing the names that I got them all mixed up. Plus, there’s several jobs that characters have that I really have a hard time picturing because it’s not the 1800s anymore. The “druggist”, the “chemist”, the “philosophical” medical doctor, the wet nurse, blah blah, there’s so many names and social practices that are completely foreign to me and that probably made the plot more convoluted than it actually is.
Ohhh my god, OK. So, I know Emma is all repressed and stuff in her boring marriage which makes her act out, but holy shit she’s annoying. At first I thought maybe her physical and mental health woes were pretty natural for someone in her position, and then they’re just made out to be really dramatic and strange because she’s a woman and that’s not how women are “supposed” to be (also, I’m reading this from a modern medical perspective, so someone who is “insane” in the olden times might just be afflicted by like, symptoms we recognize as anxiety or depression today). BUT. As the book went on, I kept trying to see where like, Emma’s need to just sit inside all day or feelings of wanting to die were just symptoms of major depression. Eventually though I felt like her mood swings and antics were her literally just being difficult and it was frustrating/annoying. Particularly when she’s with her lover and keeps seeing him but is bored by him but she keeps doing all this dramatic shit anyway. And maybe there’s a less common modern mental health diagnosis that would explain her actions. Or there isn’t any explanation since she’s just a character in a novel and is designed to be a foil for social commentary. Whatever it is, I got really tired of Emma by the end of the book. Especially when she kept buying things on credit and then got confused when she racked up debt and people came after her for the money. Like. Emma!!! What did you expect!! You have to pay for what you buy and if you don’t people will come after you for it!! Also: buying more and more expensive things on credit=debt, it’s not that complicated!! Ughhhhh >:(
Related to finances, it’s interesting to realize how...upper-class this book is (and it’s very 1800s upper-class where you just like, have ostrich feathers for decoration, or have “exotic” “treasures” just to ~be interesting~ (when really it’s stolen/practically stolen cultural memorabilia from places they look down upon, but that’s a whole other conversation)). I don’t have much more to say about how class operates in this book and what that means; just maybe that it all reminds me that “classic” literature is told from a very specific POV that’s most likely not wholly representative of what “the past” was really like.
Lastly, I knew this book wasn’t going to end well for Emma because classic novels never end well for “bad” women (not saying that what Emma did is commendable, but you kind of know she’s going to die a la Anna Karenina)
So, I’d accepted that she was going to die, so when that happened I wasn’t surprised or anything. But then there was like, 40min of audio left! That was a pain. She already died what else is there to say? The ending left me...mad?
Spoiler
Charles finds out in the most un-dramatic way that Emma wasn’t faithful, there’s a weird interaction between him and Rudolphe, then he kills himself. Then we move on to what the druggist/journalist man is up to?? What happens to his life after our main characters are dead? I think my lack of understanding about the ending is partly from how I keep forgetting who’s who in the secondary cast. EVEN SO. When we get to the last line about an anecdote of this dude’s life, I was like “What!?? That’s it??” When it ended like that, my reaction was like, “why did I bother reading this story?” It feels so random/unrelated to the main plot as an ending that it almost like, negates my experience with the rest of the book. Wholly unsatisfying as an ending, IMO
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emma bovary sounds like narcystyczne zaburzenie osobowosci
emotional
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Boring.....I tried but I just could not get into this book. After numerous attempts I could not get past page 125 and gave up.
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes