Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
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A vibrant new translation of a centuries-old classic
Gustave Flaubert’s witticisms and criticisms are as sharply tailored as a frock coat — but a sub-par translation can weigh them in time. It’s taken a masterly new edition to make his ballad of connubial boredom sound as fresh as a Parisian tabloid. This widely heralded new translation by Lydia Davis can make you forget that Flaubert’s desperate housewife was envisioned more than a hundred years ago.
The honeymoon is barely over, and Emma Bovary is suffocating in her marriage to country doctor Charles. He is hardworking, loving and faithful, if a bit of a dullard who can’t follow an opera without whispering anxiously in her ear. Emma yearns for a life beyond provincial Yonville and her quotidian neighbors — she craves Paris and the widescreen romance of her favorite novels: filled with decorous balls, fine linens and dashing gentlemen who will sacrifice everything for her. “Love, she believed, must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and bolts of lightning.” With Charles, it’s a soggy patch of grass.
Emma takes up with two lovers, bookish Léon Dupuis and rakish Rodolphe Boulanger, each offering the passion and intellect she feels she’s missing. When Léon remarks, “What could be better, really, than to sit by the fire in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the windowpanes, and the lamp burns?,” her heart practically bursts into flames in front of her husband.
Lydia Davis has been the real story behind this new text. The author, poet and French scholar studied countless editions, as well as Flaubert’s letters, while putting together her own, and she writes dangerously close to his hand. In Flaubert’s famously deliberate prose you’ll find a cautionary tale of romance and deceit. Joined by Kate Reading’s soft, patrician narration, Madame Bovary is as much the fireplace book it was in 1856.
