quadrille 's review for:

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

3.0

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I read this on a bit of a whim, to get some more ~classics~ in, plus for my “a book older than 100 years” bingo square. I did enjoy Flaubert’s cynical, dryly humorous prose — I purposefully bought the Lydia Davis translation, too, because I’d heard good things about its straightforward matter-of-factness, the way it preserves its clinical, unimpressed distance from the preposterous, terrible people populating the novel. There were so many times when I gave a wry chuckle and highlighted a few choice sardonic quotes.

I love hubris and I love doomed fuckups, so watching the inevitable trainwreck of Emma Bovary’s life was alright for a time; it was all about dissatisfied people wanting so much more beyond their means, never knowing how to just be happy with their lot. So perhaps oddly, Homais and Lheureux were my favourites: next to hopeless people like the Bovaries, I loved following the cunning pharmacist and pawnbroker, and the former’s hilarious pomposity and social aspirations. They were the two winners of the novel tbh.

That said, the ending is too long, and it drags on; I found myself dozing off and took me a couple weeks to read this despite being less than 400 pages, whoops. I feel like I’ve forgotten how to read books or write reviews. I need to recover somehow :[