missmim 's review for:

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

1.0

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Please--someone explain to me why this book is heralded as such a classic. I really don't understand it and I keep thinking that I'm missing something on a cultural or historic level. Henry James wrote that Madame Bovary is an example of the perfect novel and I just can't help but think someone paid him to write that (and/or he was taking the piss). If Emma Bovary appeals to you on any level, it is just written in the stars that we will not get along. I can have plenty of sympathy for the brand of desperate housewife Bovary exemplifies here (see my love of Anna Karenina), except Flaubert makes her so deliberately superficial, selfish and narcissistic that I can't help but feel very, very glad when she kills herself at the end. Flaubert himself is quoted to have said, "Madame Bovary is shit!" and I have to agree with the guy.