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pinkmooon 's review for:
Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners
by Gustave Flaubert, Malcolm Bowie
Madame Bovary has a reputation that precedes it, and yet, somehow, it was not at all what I expected it to be. This book is famous as ‘a writer’s novel’, which first brought to my mind, I believe, Brian Eno’s words about the Velvet Underground and Nico - only a thousand people bought the album, but they all started bands as a result.
In terms of style, I could see the dedicated craft in Flaubert’s sentence construction, and can understand why Nabokov said that Flaubert does with prose what poetry is meant to do. What surprised me was the extent Flaubert’s prose took a back seat to my reception of the novel.
Despite the story being well-known, I was genuinely horrified and scandalized by Emma’s actions and their inevitable consequence. I can imagine during the obscenity trial following the book’s release genuinely being on the side of the censor. It’s a shocking novel today in a way the explicit portrayals of sex and violence on television fail to elicit engagement or response.
Indeed, the reason I give this 4 stars instead of 5 is due to my unexpected sense of moral outrage. I shall certainly reread it in a hope of interpreting it from a more disinterested aesthetic standpoint, but I couldn’t do it here. I was overwhelmed by the ugliness of Flaubert’s France. I truly understand this as a great ‘realist’ novel, for I responded to the tragedy of the story with the same queasy sensation of disgust and fractured pity that commonplace tragedies tend to invoke. This is not an Aristotelian tragedy. One is left hollowed, without catharsis, and can only respond with empty laughter.
In terms of style, I could see the dedicated craft in Flaubert’s sentence construction, and can understand why Nabokov said that Flaubert does with prose what poetry is meant to do. What surprised me was the extent Flaubert’s prose took a back seat to my reception of the novel.
Despite the story being well-known, I was genuinely horrified and scandalized by Emma’s actions and their inevitable consequence. I can imagine during the obscenity trial following the book’s release genuinely being on the side of the censor. It’s a shocking novel today in a way the explicit portrayals of sex and violence on television fail to elicit engagement or response.
Indeed, the reason I give this 4 stars instead of 5 is due to my unexpected sense of moral outrage. I shall certainly reread it in a hope of interpreting it from a more disinterested aesthetic standpoint, but I couldn’t do it here. I was overwhelmed by the ugliness of Flaubert’s France. I truly understand this as a great ‘realist’ novel, for I responded to the tragedy of the story with the same queasy sensation of disgust and fractured pity that commonplace tragedies tend to invoke. This is not an Aristotelian tragedy. One is left hollowed, without catharsis, and can only respond with empty laughter.