A review by lucysbookshelf
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

reflective medium-paced

5.0

I usually struggle to enjoy French literature and never get an explanation as to why that happens, and yet, this book proved to me that some books are an amazing exception and I couldn’t be happier about it. 

Flaubert, just like every reader of Don Quixote, liked how he apparently was driven to madness due to reading too much and decided to write a similar theory for Madame Bovary. So we get the story of a young woman whose life is ruined and who suffers because of the ideals she enjoyed in books, the adventures and passions she lived through pages and that she wanted to have in real life. 

I felt sympathy towards Emma, I thought she was probably hated and set as a bad example for her time (both in fiction and in the world by readers) due to her being a woman who craved manly passions. For the 19th century, a woman who wasn’t content with her sort, felt dissatisfied in her marriage, wanted sexual encounters and never felt satisfied were all masculine traits and feelings that would be considered normal, but for a woman who was supposed to be content with her lot of staying at home wherever her husband chose that was, administrating the money instead of using for personal purposes and finding a reason to live in her children and husband, she broke all the rules possible. 

What makes this story work is the parody of romantic elements Flaubert used like those moments of desperation for love that could end in death, the exaggeration in feeling and the must do things like writing love letters of courtship for someone you actually feel nothing for. 

Flaubert’s writing, the emotional, witty, the sarcastic and the comedic parts equally made this novel enjoyable and one impossible to forget.