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nas12 's review for:
Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
Well, this definitely wasn’t the book for me. I could have given it 2 stars but I recognize that, even though I didn’t enjoy it because it wasn’t of my taste, it is a good novel and a classic. One of my main issues was the writing style. I can’t really pint point why, since I have read novels that were more dense and yet reading them didn’t feel as tedious. I guess the descriptions became a bit too much at times, without them feeling poetic or smooth enough for my liking; I couldn’t shake the feeling that I have could skipped entire chapters or pages without missing any remarkable information that affected the plot or the knowledge we have of the characters. I’m aware that Gustave Flaubert wrote Emma as a taunt toward his own society, but there are characters one love to hate and that in a way one likes because their complexity and all the defects they represents, and then there is Emma. I didn’t feel sympathy for her even once, I didn’t find her interesting, I didn’t laugh about her misfortunes, I didn’t enjoy her as a character at all. In fact the plot was interesting at some points but Emma stained those moments for me. I actually can’t say that I liked any of the characters in the novel, even though normally I tend to cheer for the underdogs, the broken and the characters with a dubious morality. The last two chapters of the novel felt like a torture, the story was over and yet still going. To say something positive, I think it was very brave of the author to address so many subjects that were taboo for the society of his time in a way that pretends to make fun of instead of trying to teach a lesson.