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destrier 's review for:

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3.0

Davis' translation reads very well. It is almost too good, because it is easy to read as a British 19th c. novel with such elegant prose and forget that it is a French novel in translation. I kept imagine everyone speaking with the wrong accent and leaving London for the summer.

Lines such as "Every notary carries within him the debris of a poet." are priceless.

I appreciate Flaubert's aggressive use of irony. He mixes the high and low to undermine the high. None of the characters/archetypes escape ridicule, and the three central characters are tortured with seeming glee by the author. The result is a clear and largely satirical portrait of the middle class in 1850's France.

I'm embarrassed to rate a classic middling, but I personally didn't enjoy this as much as novels that invest more in their characters or present a less uniform march through their lives.