Madame Bovary: Provincial Lives (Penguin Classics)

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Like a sailor in distress, she kept casting desperate glances over the solitary waster of her life, seeking some white sail in the distant mists of the horizon.

Book Summary - CliffsNotes

Similarly, in his preface to his novel The Joke, Milan Kundera wrote, "not until the work of Flaubert did prose lose the stigma of aesthetic inferiority. One of the most severe of academic critics admits that in all his works, and in every page of his works, Flaubert may be considered a model of style. I found this novel very hard to love - unsympathetic main character, a detached style - but another of his, Sentimental Education, was one of my early faves.From my perspective, it's one of the greatest works of the 19th century--of any century for that matter. But I also know that I shall never really comprehend the full extent of the damage done to our illusions by Flaubert's great book.

Madame Bovary: Provincial Lives (Penguin Classics) Madame Bovary: Provincial Lives (Penguin Classics)

To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless. As Emma confides in the young law student Leon, “I detest common heroes and moderate feelings, the sort that exist in real life” (p. Many of Flaubert’s missives described his creative process while writing Madame Bovary, making the genesis of the novel “one of the best-charted in fiction,” according to literary critic Renee Winegarten—the silver lining of an otherwise bitter breakup. Why do you want to make those of us with irrevocably not-size-0 rears, who can’t get from Q to R, cry?

She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification — for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery. In the case of my translation, I retained the original text and supplied these explanations in the form of “blind” end notes-i. Reflecting on his meeting with Emma a page later he attempts to explain away his aroused interest by attributing “his zeal to the gravity of the case, or perhaps to the profit he hoped to make from it” (p.