Madame Bovary (Oxford World's Classics)

Book Description

'Would this misery go on forever? Was there no escape? And yet she was every bit as good as all those other women who led happy lives!' When Emma Rouault marries Charles Bovary she imagines she will pass into the life of luxury and passion that she reads about in sentimental novels and women's magazines. But Charles is a dull country doctor, and provincial life is very different from the romantic excitement for which she yearns. In her quest to realize her dreams she takes a lover, and begins a devastating spiral into deceit and despair. Flaubert's novel scandalized its readers when it was first published in 1857, and it remains unsurpassed in its unveiling of character and society. In this new translation Margaret Mauldon perfectly captures the tone that makes Flaubert's style so distinct and admired.

Customer Reviews:

This story will stay with you.......2007-08-03

This book was a challenge initially, with many peaks and valleys to overcome. During the first half of the novel, Flaubert's overt word-painting on every trivial object nearly made me put it down. I marched on because there was a weird thread that kept telling me he was gathering for a big push. The second half of the novel was the most incredible description of this woman's self-destructive behavior in literature. I kept thinking, "God, how far is she blindly willing to go." Francis Steegmuller's translation captures the vernaculars and mood of Flaubert's intent. I compared three separate translations at the bookstore and read passages side by side to gauge the use of straightforward language. Steegmuller floored the rest; having sublimity the others did not posses. The book is on my shelf with pride.

Mixed feelings abound..........2007-07-31

I found myself incredibly annoyed by the character of Emma Bovary. Although, the story itself was written with flowery and descriptive flare, I think that Flaubert wrote Emma so well that by the time I was halfway into the book I was ready for her to just kill herself already. I trudged my way through the middle of this book only because I felt invested in it already. I didn't feel any empathy for her character. The story was very well written. A fan of Flaubert's, but I was definitely not a fan of Emma's.

It leaves you with so much.......2007-06-20

I really liked this book. Flaubert has such an interesting way of writing. His discriptions are pretty bizarre. For example the way he suggests the lusty acts that are occuring by describing the scenery or architecture.
The characters are so enigmatic and at the same time very simple. That's kind of how the whole book is, complexingly simple. Homais uses a line of (paraphrasing) mistaking arsenic for sugar when making vanilla custard. For me this was the theme of the book, but I'm sure it's different for others.
It's a book that leaves you thinking. There's just so much to take from it and you'd never get it all no matter how many times you read it.

Much like Emma's life..........2007-06-01

... a slog through the beginning and middle, really great toward the end, uninteresting at the end.

I was bored with both the story and the writing until about half way through the book. Suddenly the prose seemed to jump off of the page and the story swept me along. Like Anna Karenina, but not as good, this is a textbook example of fantasy and love addiction.

I can't see anything here that a young person could relate to. I hope high school students aren't still being tortured by being required to read it.

The Woes of an Incurable Romantic .......2007-05-27

This is a well written tale about an old story: a woman gets married and finds out that marriage is overrated. She turns to adultery and finds out that this does not satisfy either. It reminds me of the Kate Chopin tale, The Awakening, of a woman in similar circumstances with similar characteristics. Emma Bovary is a pre-cursor to the modern woman: bored, self-centered, and unrealistic. She is not interested in raising her child, helping her husband, or making friends with other women. She has servants to do the housework, so she has a lot of time to feel sorry for herself.

Emma Bovary pursues happiness but never quite catches up to it as she indulges in her passion for romance as an escape from the dullness of life in provincial towns. Even though she gets the romance she wants, she becomes dissatisfied with it later. Her pleasures are fleeting and she is ultimately dissatisfied whether she is bored or trying to escape boredom. She could not handle the mundane routines of life well. Bovary's romantic nature and her desire to live out her fantasies to relieve boredom leads to her downfall.

During her honeymoon days with Charles she imagines that she would be happier if she could travel to a far off place and live out some romantic fantasy: "Why couldn't she be leaning over a balcony in some Swiss chalet? Or nursing her melancholy in a cottage in Scotland, with a husband clad in a long black velvet coat and wearing soft leather shoes, a high crowned hat and fancy cuffs?" Charles is not the husband she dreams of. She finds out early on that he is rather dull and pragmatic. He has no interest in going to the theatre while he lives in the city of Rouen. His dress, learning, and personality cannot inspire any passions in her. He is a man with simple desires married to a woman with elaborate longings for romantic experiences, which is a classic rift in male/ female relationships: "He took it for granted that she was content; she resented his settled calm, his serene dullness, the very happiness that she herself brought him."

Her attempts to stir up passionate love from Charles do not work as she recites amorous verses and sings romantic songs to him. She takes strolls with her dog for "...the sake of a moment's solitude, a momentary relief from the everlasting sight of the back garden and the dusty road." She imagines what it might be like to be with another man who is unlike Charles had her life turned out differently. He would have a magnetic, witty, charming personality and they would live in the city where there would be opportunities to go to balls and theatres and to have "...opportunities for deep emotions and exciting sensations." Beyond this daydream, "...her life was as cold as an attic facing north and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving in the shadows, in every corner of her heart."

Looking at magazines about Paris, she imagines scenes of artists and writers who live life on a higher plane than the mundane level that she lives on. She longs to experience love with "elegant living" and "sensitive feeling" in a romantic place such as the Paris of her dreams. She tries to overcome her boredom this way, but it only leads to more desire for the finer things. Becoming despondent, she gives up playing music, embroidery, and reading. She quits music because she will never perform in front of an approving crowd in a beautiful dress: "There wasn't a chance of her giving a concert in a short sleeved velvet gown, skimming butterfly fingers over the ivory keys of the piano, feeling the public's ecstatic murmur flow around her like a breeze..."

Emma eventually sees through the illusions of her lovely dreams of finding the perfect husband and attributes it to art making things more beautiful than they are: "Ah! If only in the freshness of her beauty, before defiling herself in marriage, before the disillusionments of adultery, she could have some great and noble heart to be her life's foundation! Then virtue and affection, sensual joys and duty would all have been one; and she would have never fallen from her high felicity. But the happiness was doubtless a lie, invented to make one despair of any love. Now she well knew the true paltriness of the passions that art painted so large."

Soon after her night at the opera, she meets Leon and has an affair with him. She goes through the same pattern of disillusionment as the passion wears down as time goes on: "She continually promised herself that the next rendezvous would carry her to the peak of bliss; but when it was over she had to admit that she felt nothing extraordinary." Her passions were the sole concern of her life and she was not careful with money as she pursued her affair. As she spends more money to keep up her romantic illusions, she still does not have happiness and she remarks that adultery is as banal as marriage.

But for all her striving to fulfill romantic passions to relieve her boredom, there is moral condemnation of Emma as the priest does the final rites: "First he anointed her eyes, once so covetous of earthly luxury, then her nostrils, so gluttonous of caressing breezes and amorous scents; then her mouth, so prompt to lie, so defiant in pride, so loud in lust; then her hands, that had thrilled to voluptuous contacts, and finally the soles of her feet, once so swift when she had hastened to slake her desires, and now never to walk again."

Sentimental Education (Penguin Classics)

Average customer rating:

Flaubert's Sentimental Education: one reason why life's worth living.
A novel about unfulfilled promise
The Best Novel to Come Out of Second Empire France
A brilliant novel by the author of Madame Bovary is a tour de force of mid -19th century French fiction
A "Regular People" Review

Sentimental Education (Penguin Classics)
Gustave Flaubert
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0140447970

Book Description

Based on Flaubert's own youthful passion for an older woman, Sentimental Education was described by its author as “the moral history of the men of my generation.” It follows the amorous adventures of Frederic Moreau, a law student who, returning home to Normandy from Paris, notices Mme Arnoux, a slender, dark woman several years older than himself. It is the beginning of an infatuation that will last a lifetime. He befriends her husband, an influential businessman, and as their paths cross and re-cross over the years, Mme Arnoux remains the constant, unattainable love of Moreau's life. Blending love story, historical authenticity, and satire, Sentimental Education is one of the great French novels of the nineteenth century.

Customer Reviews:

Flaubert's Sentimental Education: one reason why life's worth living. .......2007-10-05

"I want to write the moral history of the men of my generation-- or, more accurately, the history of their feelings. It's a book about love, about passion; but passion such as can exist nowadays--that is to say, inactive." --Flaubert on Sentimental Education.

Best known for his novel, Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert's (1821-1880) last novel, Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale, 1869) is not only my favorite Flaubert novel, but one of my all-time favorite novels. Drawn from Flaubert's personal experience (and youthful passions) and set in Paris from 1833 to 1869, it describes the life of Frédéric Moreau and his enduring love for an older, slender, dark woman, Madame Arnoux. Wheras Frédéric is an impoverished law student from provincial France, Mme [Marie] Arnoux is the married mother of two children, who moves to Rome by the end of the novel. Throughout the novel, Frédéric is more interested in experiencing intimacy with Mme Arnoux than his studies. She becomes a symbol of unattainable love, and for Frédéric the path to disillusionment, making this one of the greatest coming-of-age stories of all time. Flaubert was a man of letters who earned his living by the sweat of his brow, known for laboring an entire week over a single page of his writing. He despised clichés and inexact phrases. All of this is apparent when reading Sentimental Education, which in my opinion is a perfect novel. Is Sentimental Education worth reading? Well, Woody Allen fans may remember that his character in Manhattan included this novel as one of his reasons why life's worth living.

G. Merritt

A novel about unfulfilled promise .......2006-09-11

The personal story of Frederick Moreau and the political setting of mid-19th century Paris reflect one another in the unfulfilled promise of his obsession with a married woman and the revolution's unfulfilled promise of reform and change.

The novel offers little in the way of character development and that may be the entire point. Since Moreau's sentimental obsession with Madame Arnoux drives the action to a large degree and he never lets go of it despite his experience he is a study in arrested development. He lives through tulmutuous times , witnesses fortunes made and lost and yet in the end returns with his boyhood friend to where he began and seems to have absorbed no lesson from any of it.
Flaubert's prose is eloquent and at times incredibly poetic in it's descriptions of settings and expression of feelings and the translation here is excellent.

The Best Novel to Come Out of Second Empire France.......2006-08-23

Even better than "Madame Bovary", this is the best novel to emerge from Second Empire France. A story of youthful dreams dashed and great expectations frustrated, this is Flaubert's attempt to tell the moral history of his generation, a generation that saw its hopes raised by the revolution of 1848 and then dashed by the the Napoleonic coup d'etat that established the (at first very popular) Second Empire of Napoleon III. But it's much, much more than a political or moral novel. This is one of Western literature's great explorations of love as desire and disappointment, love as frustration. The erotic, as in Stendhal's "Charterhouse of Parma," parallels the political. The hopes of the best will always be frustrated, but we are doomed to live, condemned (in the words of that great Flaubertian, Jean-Paul Sartre) to be free. Flaubert concludes that the happiest moment in a man's life comes before he is even a man, when his illusions remain intact, before he crosses the threshold into his first brothel. The brothel, then, becomes Flaubert's ultimate metaphor for our prostituted world.

A brilliant novel by the author of Madame Bovary is a tour de force of mid -19th century French fiction.......2006-08-04

This novel was published in 1869 by Gustave Flaubert and was
always fated to play second fiddle to Madame Bovary. The novel
tells the story of Fred Moreau (something of a male Madame Bovary whose heart, heart and life are filled with whimsical
daydreams of fame, fortune and love). Morea has an unfulfilled lust for the rich and married Madame Arnoux. His quixotic quest of this very ordinary woman is told as social comedy, satire and
wit by the brilliant Flaubert.
Moreau pursues several wisps in the wind of his ambitions:
He dreams of becoming:
a lawyer; a politician; a novelist; a rich aristocrat with a
beautiful wife and home in the provinces and a world traveller.
He achieves nothing in his wasted life running through a huge
inheritance on wine, women and song. The complications he involves himself in with prostitutes, middle class ladies
and wealthy women provide wheel within wheel for those readers
who enjoy soap opera shenanigans.
The book has a huge ensemble cast and it is sometimes hard to keep the characters apart. Long discussions are held concerning
every topic imaginable from social structure, French politics,
art and literature. I found it best to forget the somewhat static plot and let the impressionistic strokes by Flaubert
help me paint a mental picture of post-Revolutionary Paris.
This book takes some getting used to but it is worthwhile if
the patient reader will let his/her mind be guided by the master
novelist.
This book was loved by Franz Kafka and reminded me of the work
of Balzac and Marcel Proust.
The introduction in the Penguin Edition as well as the translation is well done,

A "Regular People" Review.......2005-11-24

This book is great, easy to understand by the average person, the plot moves along at a good pace and the ending is very good. You need to read this book...and keep me updated!

Average customer rating:

A Compelling, Complex, Classic
Disturbingly Brilliant
The unsurpassed masterpiece of the European novel
Madame Bovary, or Provincial Lives
Good for discussion; not a page-turner

Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics)
Gustave Flaubert
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0140449124

Book Description

For this novel of French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, Flaubert invented a paradoxically original and wholly modern style. His heroine, Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. A succès de scandale in its day, Madame Bovary remains a powerful and arousing novel.

Translated with an Introduction by Geoffrey Wall
New Preface by Michèle Roberts

Customer Reviews:

A Compelling, Complex, Classic.......2007-09-10

"The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ''What does a woman want?'" Sigmund Freud

This is one unforgettable classic! I don't even know how to begin describing it, mainly because of the complexity of the main character Emma Bovary. When I finished this novel (almost in tears, for the ending is both tragic and very distressing) I walked away from it feeling extremely fortunate to be born in a time and place in which I have complete freedom. For, in a nutshell, what plagued our heroine throughout her entire life was the simple fact that she was trapped being a woman in a man's world (the novel takes place during the mid 19th century in Normandy). You see, Madame B. is no common, run-of-the-mill mademoiselle. On the contrary this gal is blessed with it all - beauty, brains, passion, etc... You name it, she's got it! She is the true embodiment of femininity - possessing style, grace, and a keen eye for artistic beauty, on top of also being a great cook, excellent piano player, having a knack for home-decor, sewing, drawing, etc... There is seemingly nothing she can't do or isn't good at.

Her tragic mistake (which is usually the case with many talented people throughout history) is that she marries the wrong person. Her husband Charles Bovary is a man who 'knew nothing, taught nothing, desired nothing' the complete antithesis of his enlightened wife Emma. Flaubert further defines him early on in the novel: 'Charles's conversation was as flat as any pavement... rousing no emotion, no laughter, no reverie. He had never ventured to the theatre... he couldn't swim, or fence or shoot...' In other words, he's boring as hell, and although he absolutely worships the ground his wife walks on, she, on the other hand, slowly begins to resent this servile, supine, sappy simpleton she finds herself tied down to. To complicate matters even further, she ends up pregnant and giving birth to a girl, Berthe (of course Emma was hoping and praying for a son, for 'a man, at least, is free...'). Depressed and engrossed with the eternal ennui, which inflicts so many women who marry men they feel no passion nor love toward, Emma embarks on her own personal crusade to find that happiness which always seems to be eluding her. A self-indulgent quest that in the end, only leads to catastrophic consequences for both her and her family.

What makes this masterpiece "Madame Bovary" such an interesting read is how totally modern this story is. Emma, desperately seeking an escape from being a lonesome, unfulfilled house-wife and mother, soon becomes a shopaholic, racking up debt all over town. When she is not shopping and spending money, she's having adulterous liaisons with men who... well, you shall have to see for yourself. While I was reading this, I kept thinking to myself, I know women like this! I see them all the time in the area (Silicon Valley, Northern California) in which I live. Beautiful women, who married their far from beautiful husbands for money and security. They don't work, have nannies taking care of the kids, while they cruise around in their new Mercedes or BMW shopping all day and hopping in the sack (although, like Emma, very discreetly) with one man after another. They hang out at upscale bars/restaurants with each other bitching about how difficult their lives are, how much they despise their husbands, their next trip to Europe, etc... while sipping on hundred dollar bottles of wine and comparing plastic surgeons. Talk about a sad, pathetic life... Just like Emma, these barracudas are completely empty inside. They can find no happiness from within, and the more material things they possess, the more their insatiable appetites go unfed... There is no price that can be placed for love. No one material item or one night of unbridled, erotic passion can ever replace the true love of a spouse or child.

The first part (there are three parts in all) of this novel was a bit slow, but once you get to part two, be prepared to be totally enraptured with this beautiful story. I am so happy, after all of these years, to have finally read this excellent classic. Truly worthy of five stars!

Disturbingly Brilliant.......2007-06-14

When I first began reading Madame Bovary, I was skeptical about a book revolving around the telltale subject-adultery. I was wondering how the reader was supposed to root for a woman who forsakes her husband again and again to seek self-absorbed, transient passions.

Brilliantly, Flaubert situates the novel so the reader can sympathize with either. He introduces the husband first, which is significant, as we know his back-story, but then we are introduced to the restrained beauty in the convent who longs for the adventures she zealously consumes in her books. It is a colorful account of a woman trying to chase away the boredom in her life. Absolutely brilliant.

The unsurpassed masterpiece of the European novel.......2007-06-04

Beyond its deservedly much-praised stylistic and structural perfection, the power of Gustave Flaubert's spectacular novel "Madame Bovary" comes from the fact that it addresses head-on one of the fundamental issues of human existence: the mechanisms humans invent for themselves to meet their own emotional needs. Romantic love is presented here as such a mechanism invented to help satisfy the human urge for sex in a non-commercial setting, in other words without direct cash payment, as for instance in prostitution.

Indeed, to survive, a man --- let me start with a man and not with Emma Bovary herself --- needs to eat, he needs to have a roof over his head and as of the onset of puberty he has to have his sexual needs attended to. To eat, man can shop for food, that's what the grocer is for. The home he needs can also be purchased, not from the grocer but from the builder and the decorator. When it comes to the sex, that too is freely available for purchase in any society, whether or not it is run by the bourgeoisie. In this case the purchase is made neither from the grocer, nor from the builder or the decorator, but from the prostitute. Remarkably, before meeting her, both Emma Bovary's lovers, had met their sexual needs in this commercial setting. We see Rodolphe Boulanger, even before becoming Emma's first lover, cynically calculating how he is going to get rid of her, once he will have had enough. After all, that is the only detail that strikes him as different from what transpires in a sexual transaction with a prostitute whom he can quit without any discussion as soon as he has paid up. He wants to connect with Emma not to save himself some money, he is well-to-do after all, but to "experience" non-commercial sex. Of course, unlike a prostitute, you do not pay an adulteress in cash. Another form of payment is extracted. The price is a pretense of love, of romantic love like in novels. Yes, Emma Bovary has read many a romantic novel in her time and knows all-too-well what to expect in matters of such romantic love. It is spectacular to watch how Emma and both her lovers play this romantic love game and in moments of sexual abandon are able to completely suspend disbelief. Flaubert is reducing romantic love to a currency, not unlike the cash that buys life's other necessities.

To Emma, a woman, love is something else altogether, something learned from novels. In this respect she drives Flaubert to one of the main issues of western civilization's novel, the effect of romantic novels on naïve readers. This issue had been forcefully raised already by Miguel de Cervantes, the inventor of the modern western novel. After all, his Don Quixote de la Mancha, is also an avid reader of romantic novels, and the lessons he draws from this reading set him up for fighting windmills, and asexually revering Dulcinea, a feminine creation of his own imagination. Emma Bovary, reads not the Spanish trash available to the Knight of the Mournful Countenance, but Sir Walter Scott and his like. Her second love affair is jump-started at a performance of Gaetano Donizetti's operatic setting of Sir Walter's "The Bride of Lammermoor." Whereas Cervantes pokes fun at the romantic novel, Flaubert explores what appear to be its outright tragic consequences. In this sense "Madame Bovary" is about the role of literature in everyday life.

But at a closer look, this role of literature is not as tragic by far as it first appears. After all, when dumped by Rodolphe Boulanger, her first lover, Emma Bovary gets herself a second lover Léon Dupuis, and could probably get herself a third lover once the affair with Léon runs its course. She is done in not by matters of love, but by the cavalier manner in which she handles her own and her husband's finances. It is her dealings with the unscrupulous merchant Lheureux that bring about her downfall. Lheureux couldn't care less about love, he is a strictly cash-and-carry fellow. In his own way, he tries to help Emma, to bring her to her senses. He sends her to the notary Guillaumin, who for a change offers to pay for her sexual services with money rather than with professions of romantic love. This prompts a revolted Emma's famous line, "Sir, you shamelessly take advantage of my distress. I am to be pitied, but I am not for sale." Spoken like a reader of Sir Walter Scott. Emma Bovary's willingness to find the sweet nothings whispered in her ear by Rodolphe and Léon as the only currency in which to accept payment for her sexual services, is tantamount to Don Quixote's willingness to fight the windmills.

So, in the end, Madame Bovary is as much about the role of literature in our lives, as about adultery or bourgeois philistinism, its most obvious themes. Lest one walk away with a bad feeling where matters literary are concerned, Flaubert spikes his text with his remarkable insights into the nature of great literature. Consider a paragraph in part II, Chapter 12, which starts as an astute examination of Rodolphe's jaded reaction to Emma's romantic chit-chat, and then smoothly meanders into as good a statement of the basic problem faced by a writer, as has ever been put in words by anyone "Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing bears, while aiming to move the stars to tears." Never mind the bears, Flaubert shoots for the stars and is right on target.

Madame Bovary, or Provincial Lives.......2007-05-08

Flaubert himself gave the book two titles. The first, MADAME BOVARY, is Emma, a beautiful convent-educated bourgeoise who, growing up reading nothing but Romantic literature, expects real life to match. Marrying a devoted but prosaic husband, she seeks solace where she can find it, with predictably tragic results. It is a beautifully anti-romantic object lesson in the dangers of romanticism, told with a sexual frankness which shocked its original readers, but which now inevitably seems a little tame.

But this sordid plot is contained in a novel that is satirical, even comic, portraying the complex pettiness inherent in the book's second title, PROVINCIAL LIVES. Flaubert hilariously counterpoints Emma's first steps towards adultery, for instance, with the speechifying of some petty functionary at an agricultural fair. In addition to Emma's mediocre doctor husband Charles, and her two lovers (the infatuated Léon and the libertine Rodolphe), the author includes many peripheral characters who together make up a portrait of small-town society, from the self-aggrandizing apothecary Homais to the draper and usurious money-lender Lheureux. But Flaubert can also temper his satirical edge in magnificent descriptions of scenes ranging from a village market to a provincial opera performance. [While I am in no position to say if the Penguin translation by Geoffrey Wall is better or worse than the others available, it is certainly good enough to give me much enjoyment in these passages, and is faithful to the French text of those sections that I have compared.]

Though tied to a particular place and time, the social and commercial elements of the story come across with startling modernity. It is, as I say, a little difficult to recapture the physical eroticism that so shocked its original readers, but its psychological aspect is still acute. Indeed, whether fully-fleshed or sketched in, the psychology of Flaubert's characters always rings true. For all that, Flaubert always has the air of writing from the outside, even when talking about Emma. The result is to show a story of decline that is all too plausible, and which leaves one helpless to intervene. The Bovary story may end in tragedy, but the provincial comedy that contains it continues unruffled on its petty course.

Good for discussion; not a page-turner.......2007-04-25

I read this for a book club. I have to admit that I'm not sure I see why it has received all this acclaim. There were pages that I just had to force myself to wade through. That being said, I can see for it's time that it was quite a thriller. The writing style is just so much different than what we as readers of most modern novels are accustomed to.

I never felt any kind of sympathy for Emma Bovary, but yet I do believe she is representative of those individuals who are always looking outward to something or someone else to make them happy. Manners, customs, fashions, lifestyles have changed, but there are still plenty of Emma Bovarys today. Good literature lets us see human nature at its best or at its worst; this book does that.

As the saying goes, "So many books, so little time" -- if you have lots of time, read this. However, if there's only so much time, there are many more modern novels that will be easier to read and relate to.

Average customer rating:

One man's obsession is another man's parrot.
DEAD PARROTS SOCIETY
Intruiging and Enchanting!
Quite Effective
Tres Charmant

Flaubert's Parrot
Julian Barnes
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0679731369
Release Date: 1990-11-27

Amazon.com

Just what sort of book is Flaubert's Parrot, anyway? A literary biography of 19th-century French novelist, radical, and intellectual impresario Gustave Flaubert? A meditation on the uses and misuses of language? A novel of obsession, denial, irritation, and underhanded connivery? A thriller complete with disguises, sleuthing, mysterious meetings, and unknowing targets? An extended essay on the nature of fiction itself?

On the surface, at first, Julian Barnes's book is the tale of an elderly English doctor's search for some intriguing details of Flaubert's life. Geoffrey Braithwaite seems to be involved in an attempt to establish whether a particularly fine, lovely, and ancient stuffed parrot is in fact one originally "borrowed by G. Flaubert from the Museum of Rouen and placed on his worktable during the writing of Un coeur simple, where it is called Loulou, the parrot of Felicité, the principal character of the tale."

What begins as a droll and intriguing excursion into the minutiae of Flaubert's life and intellect, along with an attempt to solve the small puzzle of the parrot--or rather parrots, for there are two competing for the title of Gustave's avian confrere--soon devolves into something obscure and worrisome, the exploration of an arcane Braithwaite obsession that is perhaps even pathological. The first hint we have that all is not as it seems comes almost halfway into the book, when after a humorously cantankerous account of the inadequacies of literary critics, Braithwaite closes a chapter by saying, "Now do you understand why I hate critics? I could try and describe to you the expression in my eyes at this moment; but they are far too discoloured with rage." And from that point, things just get more and more curious, until they end in the most unexpected bang.

One passage perhaps best describes the overall effect of this extraordinary story: "You can define a net in one of two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally, you would say that it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string." Julian Barnes demonstrates that it is possible to catch quite an interesting fish no matter how you define the net. --Andrew Himes

Book Description

A kind of detective story, relating a cranky amateur scholar's search for the truth about Gustave Flaubert, and the obsession of this detective whose life seems to oddly mirror those of Flaubert's characters.

Customer Reviews:

One man's obsession is another man's parrot........2007-01-30

"You can define a net in one of two ways, depending on your point of view," Julian Barnes' protagonist observes in FLAUBERT's PARROT. "Normally, you would say that it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string" (p. 38).

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize when it was published in 1984, Julian Barnes's extraordinary novel tells the story of an amateur scholar's obsession with 19th-century French writer Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics)). Geoffrey Braithwaite is a retired, widowed, English doctor, who almost pathologically uses Flaubert's writings to make sense of his own life. Read as a detective story, FLAUBERT'S PARROT follows Braithwaite's quest for finding the stuffed parrot Flaubert "borrowed" from the Museum of Rouen while writing UN COEUR SIMPLE (in which it is called "Loulou"). In his futile attempts to differentiate between two possible parrots, Braithwaite ultimately concludes that neither could be the one used by Flaubert, and the original parrot could be one of hundreds in a major French museum. FLAUBERT'S PARROT may also be read as a biography of the French novelist (the narrative includes three chronologies of Flaubert's life; his successes and failures; his conquests, friends, lovers, and illnesses; his animal influences; and his journal entries), or as an extended meditation on the nature of fiction in general (complete with a final exam in Chapter 14). Based on his breakthrough novel, it is not surprising that Barnes has since received not only the Booker award, but both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Fémina awards, and in 1988 was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

G. Merritt

DEAD PARROTS SOCIETY.......2006-11-18

What I always keep in mind about Flaubert is that Raymond Chandler admired him. From my own distant recollections of Flaubert, I'd guess that what appealed to such a craftsman as Chandler was the workmanship - in both authors one has a similar sense that every sentence and indeed every word has been worked on with minute precision. On the other hand, Chandler was scathing about pretentiousness and affectation too. I never managed to finish anything by Flaubert because I found him a bit too literary in an offputting sense, and this was no doubt not his fault but mine. However I have to say that when it comes to Julian Barnes this is now the third novel of his that I have read, and for all his outstanding gifts he is beginning to get on my nerves slightly.

There is something rather preening and self-regarding about Barnes, I find. I don't deny him creative originality for a moment, but that comes across to me as being secondary to a wish to exercise and display his accomplishment as a writer. The way this book is put together is undeniably effective. Flaubert has a Dr Bovary, and Dr Bovary has a wife Emma who is unfaithful and kills herself. Barnes has a Dr Braithwaite who has a wife Ellen who was unfaithful and killed herself. Some combination of Dr Braithwaite and Mr Barnes (very skilfully alternated) research Flaubert's life, hanging their researches, cleverly but rather artificially, around the identification of a parrot called Loulou belonging to Flaubert's housekeeper. The significance of the parrot, I'd say, is principally to provide a good eye-catching title for the book rather than anything more essential. Dr Braithwaite is very lacklustre as a personality, and while I'm sure that was deliberate on the author's part I'm equally certain he thought his denouement was more effective and less predictable than I have just found it to be.

The way this kind of book takes me is that I find the factual material a lot more involving than the `human interest'. So far as I can tell, the research seems to have been meticulous, and I always like to see popular and superficial misconceptions put right. All the same, I could have done with less self-congratulation from Barnes and in particular with less sense of pettiness in the points he scores. Poor old Enid Starkey! I dare say she annoyed him and for all I know she might have annoyed me too, but the triumphs Barnes awards himself are not really very important. If Barnes wants to be as nitpicking as this I may as well point out to him that `ipsophagy' is a dreadful mixture of Latin and Greek roots, and if he wanted to coin such a term it ought to have been `hautophagy'.

Obviously, reactions of this kind are subjective on my part, but this is literature and I don't see any way round that. The author's personality as he projects it is not entirely a sympathetic one to me for the reasons I've attempted to explain, but other readers will doubtless react differently. What seems to me a lot less subjective is the sheer quality of what Barnes does. The man is a master and no two ways about that, I'm happy to agree. The book is all over in less than 200 pages anyway, and it is instructive as well as highly readable. Whether it has fired me up to read more by Julian Barnes is maybe doubtful, but it might just get me to have another go at Flaubert.

Intruiging and Enchanting!.......2006-01-10

I don't have much to add that other reviewers haven't already written. But I still wanted to comment on how enjoyable and memorable this book is. I bought "Madame Bovary" at the same time, but decided to read "Flaubert's Parrot" first. I can't wait to get started on "Madame Bovary", and hopefully some more of Flaubert's novels.

Quite Effective.......2005-12-14

...but not all that affective. Which is not a bad thing at all. Unless there are noble attempts at such a thing, which, I suppose, is really up to debate with this work. But what expectations can one have with a work like this? What the reader has here is not really a "novel" but something greater, something post-, something meta- (although in a bearable way, at least Barnes has taste). It is, however, quite educational, very witty, very stylish (in a good way, see "Barnes has taste" in the previous sentence for more on this) but also often quite maladroit, even if in a skillfull way. Sometimes, especially in the times when the focus is shifted to the narrator, it feels like the story is being poked into an uncomfortable position, before it returns to its natural form in the next chapter (like the metal in braces!). But, it is, at the very least, a rewarding book and at the best quite brilliant. Very muchso indeed.

Tres Charmant.......2005-11-17

This very charming and lively study of the life and work of Gustave Flaubert poses an interesting question: would you rather read a book about a subject matter that completely mirrors reality or a book that takes some license with the truth for the sake of art? The narrator of _Flaubert's Parrot_, Dr. Braithwaite, a Flaubert afficianado, delves into the master's literature and into his personal background, and comes up with various sets of facts depending upon the point of view of the source. Mr. Barnes quotes Louise Colet, a poet and Flaubert's mistress, Flaubert's friends, as well as citing from Flaubert's masterpiece, _Madame Bovary_. Mr. Barnes also presents the reader with two alternate chronologies of Flaubert's life, one idyllic and the other providing quite the opposite impression.

What I found particularly delightful about this book was the narrator's discussion of the parrot in Flaubert's novella, _A Simple Heart_. Braithwaite compares the colors of the alleged real stuffed parrot, supposedly acting as Flaubert's muse while writing _A Simple Heart_, with the parrot's description in the novella. There is even some doubt that the bird-muse that Braithwaite temporarily has in his possession was in actuality Flaubert's. Braithwaite also quotes from a Flaubert critic who chastizes Flaubert for his consistent inaccuracy in stating the color of Emma Bovary's eyes, rather than concerning herself with the novel's artistic merits.

_Flaubert's Parrot_ also concerns itself with Braithwaite's sad personal life, which may help explain some of his interest in Flaubert's romantic entanglements. This helps to lend this book a multi-faceted flavor. That, together with its rich detail and its unique take on art and its critics, makes _Flaubert's Parrot_ an unusually holding work.

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Superb scholarship but title misleads
Amazon shines re books
A Definitive Biography
A first - rate biography
Flaubert : A Biographical Masterpiece in Literature Today!!

Flaubert: A Biography
Frederick Brown
Manufacturer: Little, Brown and Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0316118788

Book Description

Gustave Flaubert (18211880), whose Madame Bovary outraged the right-thinking bourgeoisie, is now brought to life as the singular person and artist he was. As Frederick Brown reveals, Flaubert was fraught with contradictiona sedentary man who took epic voyages through Egypt and the Middle East; a man of genius who could be flamboyantly uncouth, but was fanatically devoted to beautifully cadenced prose. While making much of his camaraderie with male friends, Flaubert depended upon the emotional nurture of maternal women, notably George Sand, with whom he engaged in a justly celebrated correspondence. His assorted mistressesFrench, Egyptian, and Englishfed both his richly erotic imagination and his fictional characters, and his letters provide a record of them. Flauberts time and place literally put him on trial for portraying lewd behavior in Madame Bovary. His milieu also made him a celebrity and, indirectly, brought about his financial ruin. Flaubert died suddenly at the age of fifty-nine, and soon afterward, his beloved retreat near Rouen was torn down and converted into a distillery to cover his nieces debts. He privately dreamed of popular success, which he in fact achieved with Madame Bovary, but never sacrificed to it his ideal of artistic integrity. Frederick Browns magisterial biography honors his subjects life, times, and legacy.

Customer Reviews:

Superb scholarship but title misleads.......2006-08-26

I understand that another author's biography was more psychological and I understand that Frederick Brown wanted to examine Flaubert in a more social, historical context. I just wish Brown had come up with a slightly different title for his biography of my all-time favorite writer. Titling the biography *Flaubert* lent me to think the biography would be more psychological, rather than historical. Perhaps Brown should have considered something like *Flaubert and Normandy* or *Flaubert's Normandy.* The historical passages are well done, but I wonder if they could have been trimmed a bit. Though I have been trained in European history, I gritted my teeth while reading every word. I wonder if Brown thought to himself, "Now let me get through this so that we can get back to Flaubert's literary tribulations and relationships." Flaubert's literary struggles and relationships are the most fascinating part of this biography.

My gripes aside, this biography is densely (in the best sense of the word) and beautifully written. Flaubert's best and not so great moments are limned gorgeously. The most touching aspect of the man is how good he was to his niece Caroline and how she honored his memory. I wished I had been Willa Cather when she encountered Caroline to talk about "les ouevres de mon oncle."

Amazon shines re books.......2006-07-01

Everything as promised; prompt delivery of pristine copy of the book

A Definitive Biography.......2006-05-19

'Madame Bovary,' Flaubert's signature work celebrates 150 years of basically continuous publication. Shocking at the time because of its portrayal of the infidelities of a married woman, its publication caused Flaubert to be tried for lewdness.

Flaubert, like many writers was a tortured soul. One page from his original manuscript of 'Madame Bovary,' shows pained writing, much crossing out and re-writing. For him writing was not something he enjoyed, but more along the lines of something that he had to do. The words did not flow easily and fast, instead he struggled over each sentence, each word. But at the end, a book still in print in perhaps a dozen editions in English alone a century and a half later.

This new biography gives a look at both the life of Flaubert and also of his times. Here is a picture of the literary world that was Paris in the middle 1800's. Flaubert observed first hand the Revolution of 1848 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. While not a history of these events, Mr. Brown presents a view of them from their impact on Flaubert.

This is likely to remain the definitive biography of Flaubert for many years.

A first - rate biography.......2006-05-18

Julian Barnes in his excellent survey of this book in NY Review of Books states that Brown shows how Flaubert in the few intimate relations of his life preferred the memory of the experience in solitude where he could control it, to the actual experience itself. He cites an instance where Flaubert wrote to the woman closest to him Louise Colet explaining to her that if people truly loved each other they could do so without seeing each other for ten years. Colet appeared to be somewhat skeptical of the matter.
Barnes also says that Brown in telling the story of Flaubert's relation to his long- time friend Maxine du Camp shows how the lifelong friends nonetheless aimed differently in life, and had subtle criticisms of their best - friends' enterprises. So Flaubert upon hearing that du Camp had been accepted as member of the 'French Academy' hinted that it was an honor not at all worth receiving. So du Camp criticized Flaubert for being stuck all the years in the same attitude he had early on.
Barnes says that Brown's book is truly admirable though it contains no significant great revelation about a writer who has fascinated more than one devoted biographer.
Nonetheless he makes it clear that this is by and large a first- rate biography, and one well- worth reading.

Flaubert : A Biographical Masterpiece in Literature Today!! .......2006-04-17

In his book, "Flaubert: A Biography," Frederick Brown portrays his book by giving the readers a closer look at Paris during a period of radical change. He writes his book to illustrate a wonderful biography Madame Bovary as Gustave Flaubert. Interestingly and what makes this book fascinating is how Frederick Brown keeps his distance away from the audience to make us decide what the apparent contradictions in Flaubert's life really is. The 24 chapters not only offer a vivid, detailed, and accurate account of Flaubert's life, they also provide relevant historical background for Europe, France, and Rouen, Flaubert's birthplace. Flaubert (for those who don't know) was romantic and optimist yet his most famous work required a degree of discipline to keep his emotions out of it. He loathed the bourgeois, but perhaps was one of the greatest symbols of the social class in the middle nineteenth century when he hugged fame. Flaubert's loving relationship with his mistress Louise Colet really summed up the complexity of the subject of this fine work Mr. Brown provides in his biographical masterpiece in literature today. I really love this book a lot...since I am a fan of Gustave Flaubert. I highly recommend for those who are intellect and love to learn more about the life of Falubert and his career. Overall, 9/10!

A Sentimental Education: The Story of a Young Man (Oxford World's Classics)

Average customer rating:

DREADFUL Translation - go for Penguin Edition
Wanting it all
Surprisingly modern
A superb translation of a perfect novel
A refreshing cold bath of realism

A Sentimental Education: The Story of a Young Man (Oxford World's Classics)
Gustave Flaubert
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0192836226

Book Description

Set against the backdrop of the 1848 Revolution, A Sentimental Education is the story of young lawyer Frederic Moreau's infatuation with the demurely exotic Madame Arnoux.

Customer Reviews:

DREADFUL Translation - go for Penguin Edition.......2006-06-02

SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION is one of the glories of literature. While its context seems more dated than that in MADAME BOVARY, its language has the engaging richness of Flaubert in full glory. Knowing it and loving it, I decided it was time to reread it. Trusting to the word "Oxford," I bought and began this edition. Poor Flaubert must truly be spinning: this version is studded with the very sort of cliches that would have been anathema to him. After suffering through several of them, when I read that "his grand passion for Madame Arnoux was beginning to peter out", my patience for this version "petered out." I jettisoned this copy and ordered the also available PENGUIN CLASSIC edition with translation by Robert Baldick. I strongly urge you to select the Penguin rather than the Oxford World's version.

Wanting it all.......2004-02-24

Frederic Moureau is a young man who wants it all... he wants the great romantic life, the social commitment, the financial success, the respect from everyone. This is the perfect example of what a novel is, if we are to accept Lukacs definition of it as the epic of the ages with no gods. There is nothing in this young man's life that gives a sense of totality to his world... there are many ways to be followed, but none to actually enclose in itself the sense of the eternal horizon of time. As he meets Mme. Arnoux, one could think, by the way he thinks about her, that she is going to be his entire world, but she is not... a few moments later we find him completely devoted to the cause of his friends, and later, to his physical involvement with a woman of doubtfull reputation... etc, etc. Along with his discovery of the world and its mechanics, he submerges in his own feelings, without really finding a north to any of his purposes in the external world (be it the world of social dynamics, ambitions, of affections and of responsabilities). His journey begins when he leaves his birthplace in the country and goes to Paris. In this travel, he knows Mme. Arnoux, and then, her husband, with whom he relates very well. Once established in Paris, he keeps this relationship, in hope allways to see the wife.
From that point on, he will get involved in projects of papers, bussiness trades, purchases and social awareness. As the revolution falls upon the city, he tries to get a role in it, but he is soon rejected because of his previous (and allways ambiguous) relations with the burgouise spheres of Paris.
The end of the novel will have him remembering his awakening as a man: he goes to a house, where he can pick from a group of women... but the horizon of possibilities offered by all of them frighten him and he ends up running away... being followed by his best friend; who will allways have to run following Frederic... the one with the money.

Surprisingly modern.......2001-07-07

The American author, Thomas Wolfe, wrote that one of the keys to life was to "get reason and emotions pulling together in double harness". This novel by Flaubert could be said to examine the consequences of letting emotions take over completely.

We are presented with a world in which hedonism, materialism and narcissism take precedence over truth, and care and respect for others - the only value system is self-gratification. Other people have no intrinsic worth.

Given its take on life, I found this a novel to have a curiously modern feel - it reminded me in parts (in approach if not style)of Bret Easton Ellis. The initial surprise was that it was written so long ago. However, when one considers the socio-economic changes prevailing at that time, I questioned my surprise. Is it strange that a critique of the "unacceptable face of capitalism" (and one may add politics) should come at such a time?

The real value of "A Sentimental Education" is that it's a reminder that at various periods of history, some people do pause and reflect on human progress and the price we pay for it - does "progress" have any worth unless our values develop too?

A superb translation of a perfect novel.......2001-05-26

This is simply one of the most satisfying novels I have ever read. And the Parmee translation is excellent - there is not an awkward word or phrase anywhere in the text. Flaubert loved to write fiction which captured the pettiness, baseness, and stupidity of human relations. Misanthrope might be too harsh a word for Flaubert, but he certainly didn't have much patience for the sort of crass greed and shallow, unquestioning conformity he witnessed as a young man in Paris in the Revolution of 1848. I understand that Flaubert started working on this novel very early in his career, but abandoned it several times before finally bringing it to pres in 1869. The care and time Flaubert took in writing this novel shows, especially when you compare it to Madame Bovary, Flaubert's famous book. Bovary is an easier book to "understand". Flaubert may have felt misunderstood. Bovary can be read as an attack on the bourgeoisie, their dull, conformist lives, and the stupid and ultimately self-defeating passions they indulge in an effort to escape from the suffocating monotony of their existence. Or it can be read, as most readers tend to read, as a morality tale about the tragic consequences of adultery. The Sentimental Education sets the record straight, however. Flaubert was not a moralist preaching on the sins of adultery in Bovary. This novel makes that obvious. Here Flaubert again takes up an attack on the bourgeoisie, this time leaving no room for misunderstanding.

I once met someone (a literature student specializing in 19th century fiction, no less!) who complained to me how boring she thought the Sentimental Education was. So boring that she never bothered to finish it. To this day I believe she approached the book in the wrong frame of mind. She may have been expecting some Balzac-ish bildungsroman, about the provincial who comes to Paris and grows into a society man. Instead, she discovered a novel about a dull provincial who comes to Paris thinking he is going to grow into a society man, but is such a poor judge of human character and relations that he meets defeat at every corner. But it is one thing to say the book is dull. It is another to point out that Frederic Moreau is a very dull human being. But then, we remember... we know people like Moreau. At some point or another, we all may have even behaved like Moreau. And we know and live in a society composed of people like the rest of the characters. Moreau's world is the world of bourgeoisie. 150 years later, in another language on another continent, I am surprised to see how little some things have changed.

Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, has analyzed this novel extensively (see "The Rules of Art" and "The Field of Cultural Production") because he finds the document perfect for sociological analysis of the bourgeoisie and the intellectual communities that developed in Paris in 1848. Flaubert had a brutally frank eye and pen, quick to capture the most subtle social implications in a single gesture. After reading Flaubert and Bourdieu, I am haunted by how persistent and relevent Flaubert's vision of society and human relations continues to be.

A refreshing cold bath of realism.......2000-11-22

This is one of those books that every college Freshmen should read. No novel protrays intellectuals more accurately than this one. Flaubert documents their vanity, their dishonesty, their pettiness and their depravity. He shows us what really awful human beings they are. Young people well advised to read the novel before entering the college scene. It will help them enter the academic world with at least some inkling of what the majority (admittedly, not all) intellectuals are really like.

Book Description

The text of this Norton Critical Edition is based on Eleanor Marx Aveling's celebrated translation, revised by Paul de Man. Margaret Cohen's careful editorial revision modernizes and renews Flaubert's stylistic masterpiece. In addition, Cohen has added to the Second Edition a new introduction, substantially new annotations, and twenty-one striking images, including photographs and engravings, that inform students' understanding of middle-class life in nineteenth-century provincial France.

In Madame Bovary, Flaubert created a cogent counterdiscourse that exposed and resisted the dominant intellectual and social ideologies of his age. The novel's subversion of conventional moral norms inevitably created controversy and eventually led to Flaubert's prosecution by the French government on charges of offending "public and religious morality." This Norton edition is the only one available that includes the complete manuscript from Flaubert's 1857 trial.

"Criticism" includes sixteen studies regarding the novel's central themes, twelve of them new to the Second Edition, including essays by Charles Baudelaire, Henry James, Roland Barthes, Jonathan Culler, and Naomi Schor. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

About the Series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehensive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide.

Average customer rating:

A Beautiful Tragedy

Best of its kind

A Gem!

A True Masterpiece

Timeless Classic

Madame Bovary: 150th Anniversary Edition (Signet Classics)
Gustave Flaubert
Manufacturer: Signet Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Anna Karenina (Signet Classics)

Madame Bovary (Cliffs Notes)

Paradise of the Blind: A Novel

The Awakening

Crime and Punishment (Enriched Classics)

ASIN: 0451528204
Release Date: 2001-11-05

Book Description

Set amid the stifling atmosphere of nineteenth-century bourgeois France, Madame Bovary is at once an unsparing depiction of a woman's gradual corruption and a savagely ironic study of human stupidity. Provocative and deeply tragic, it is "possibly the most beautifully written book ever composed" (Frank O'Connor).

Translated by Mildred Marmur
With a New Introduction by Robin Morgan

Customer Reviews:

A Beautiful Tragedy.......2006-01-04

This is one of those books that always seems to come up in literary conversations, and because I like to be in the know, I decided I would pick it up between college courses and give it a try. I Loved It!!!
I was a bit surprised by the introduction to this particular book because the woman who authored it, Robin Morgan, seemed more than a touch pissed off that Flaubert was a sexist ass. In my opinion, as a feminist, it does not matter one bit. This novel is tragic, yes, but beautifully and fluidly written. While Flaubert may have been some kind of jerk (according to Robin Morgan) in his personal and/or literary life, this masterpiece is certainly worthy of praise regardless.
Sure, the characters are unlikable...and that is putting it nicely...but I cannot, in any way, say that they are unbelievable. Emma Bovary, AND her husband Charles, are fatally flawed...but such is the world we live in. Nobody is perfect and this novel is a testament to the fact.
This is a quick read, and again, it is, in my opinion, expertly and beautifully written. I am just miffed that I waited so long to dive into it! Highly recommended.

Best of its kind.......2004-08-18

Descriptive yet concise, this is some of the best writing ever! Flaubert truly sees the world as it is and spares nobody (the church, politicians, merchants, etc.). Sometimes criticized for a lack of plot, I think this unfair because real life is not often a thrill-per-minute ride, full of twists and turns. Realistically, the story REQUIRES this plot. Although published in 1857, it is as true today as ever because human nature hasn't changed. The reader truly experiences the passion and excitement of life tempered by the harsh realities so perceptively described by the author. Could it be that this novel foreshadowed Flaubert's own life? A must-read.

A Gem!.......2003-03-23

One of my favourite novels of all time! Truly astounding!
I read this when i was 13/14 for the first time (portuguese translation): i cannot recall my reaction. But 10 years l8er, during a hot, frustra8ing month of August - like all the months where there is enough sunlight 2 fry ur brains outdoors - i re-read this in 2 days sitting @ the park and lying in bed. What a thrill!!
Like Anna Karenina, Bovary is a perfect heroine. The difference is: this is a better novel. From beginning 2 end there is no fluff: just pure stylistical and emotional delirium making u snap @ every turn. I believe fully Flaubert's cry that HE was Madame Bovary: @ least u understand how ultimately inlove he was w/ her. ... It warps ur senses. It makes u turn that page faster and faster. These people r still alive in our towns, our pretentious backwaters, our petite bourgeoisie. This dreamy nihilistic boredom is perfectly contemporary, this need 2 have in order 2 forget loneliness & drape the hours w/ something more than void & human stupidity & stifling small-mindedness. I believe it was Benjamin who said something like: "The consumers relation with the real world, with politics, history and culture is not one of interest, investment or engaged responsibility. Rather, it is one of curiosity. One must try EVERYTHING: in fact man in consumer society is tormented by the fear of "missing" something, any enjoyment whatsoever... it is no longer desire or even taste or specific inclination that is in play, it is a generalised curiosity motivated by a widespread anxiety. It is the anxiety of always feeling on the verge of - but only on the verge of - finally grasping the object of desire, the meaning of life, the rules of the game."
A literary miracle and a pure, luminous joy! :o)

A True Masterpiece.......2003-02-19

Madame Bovary is, without a doubt, the best book I have ever read, and I love to read. This is a story about human nature and irony. Emma Bovary wants every man, but the man who adores her. She is selfish, oblivious, and cold. Her husband, Charles, is crazy for her, and she is disgusted by his unconditional love for her. This book is exciting and adventerous, but the element of reality is there too. The mixture of fantasy and reality is beautiful. If you enjoy reading, then this book is a must! I can not reccommend it too highly.

Timeless Classic.......2002-11-09

I read this book as a required reading for my 12 grade Advanced Placement english class and found it a very quick, enjoyable read. Often times a lot is lost in translation, but with a book as wonderful as Madame Bovary, no matter how you slice it it comes off as a masterpiece. A wonderful story about the rise and fall of a once peasant farm girl to a woman of luxury and an adulturous past. This book has everything: sex, love, passion, intrigue, tragedy, death, lies, and appealing characters. Read Madame Bovary!

Average customer rating:

Not too wild
A Bit of a Disappointment, Very Slow, and Sometimes a Confusing Read
Clouded, Debauched Banquet
Worthy of a wider audience
A blood bath with little feeling.

Salambo (Penguin Classics)
Gustave Flaubert
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0140443282

Book Description

Translated by Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant.
Introduction and Notes by Harold Tarrant.

Download Description

An epic story combining lust, cruelty, riches, ritual and sensuality, few French historical novels can stand comparison with Salammbo.

Customer Reviews:

Not too wild.......2007-09-30

I didn't dislike the book. And in retrospect, there were some well-created scenes. But a lot of it is flowery language that doesn't really move a plot. So in short, very vivid background and characters, not a whole lot of interaction. If you're looking for excellent French literature that is both descriptive in detail and maintains momentum in prose, you're best off with Dumas.

A Bit of a Disappointment, Very Slow, and Sometimes a Confusing Read.......2007-04-15

One must admire the research that went into the book, and for that the novel has some value. Beyond the historical research, there are few positive things to recommend the novel.

There are no literary hooks and overall it is not a well balanced novel. There are many characters and lots of killings and confusion. One wonders if Flaunbert was the author. Is this the same Flaubert that created the masterpiece "Madame Bovary"? Yes it is, but what a change. The writing is good, but the subject is bad and the novel lacks warmth and charm. Perhaps fatal for the novel, it lacks realistic and interesting characters and good dialogue.

I bought and read "Madame Bovary" in a day and loved every moment of that reading experience. It was a compelling novel, balanced, charming, concise, great characters, great prose, etc. It was impossible to put down that 500 page masterpiece. Since then I have read other works by Flaubert such as "Sentimental Education" and was not disappointed.

This book has lots of historical detail, many characters, and lots of blood and gore but little else. The characters are wooden. The plot is hard to follow. The ending is a bit unrealistic. The rest of the novel has too many twists and turns, and too many characters. The protagonist Salambo is an enigma. The character Matho is too far from reality as is Hamilcar, the Suffete of Carthage.

The greatest disappoint is the read itself. I could read only 10 or 20 pages at a time before losing interest. This is a great novel if you are having trouble sleeping.

By the time I got to the end of the 300 pages, I was happy to be done with the book. Yes, I am finished this crazy book!

Mark this one down as Flaubert's folly or one of his mistakes.

Better reads from Flabert:

- Madame Bovary
- Sentimental Education
- The Temptation of Saint Anthony
- Three Tales

Clouded, Debauched Banquet.......2005-03-25

I enjoyed this novel enough to recommend it, but I'm sure it's not for everyone. In a way the things I like about it are integrally interwoven with its flaws. For example, I love the luxurious detail that Flaubert gives. You'd think he was actually there, the way he describes every morsel of food, each tribe's jewelry, customs, idiosyncracies. He has details that he lays out like a lush banquet, way too much to actually eat, but beautiful to gaze at. The flaw in this for me is that Flaubert in the notes makes such a big case for how everything is historically accurate. That's silly. He can't possibly believe that he can reach back two thousand years and render everything with complete precision. I mean reporters writing things that happened this afternoon only ever get it partially right, so how could he manage it? The answer is that he couldn't and that he doesn't have to. This is a novel and as such all the detail works; I just wish Flaubert hadn't taken himself so seriously. Sort of spoils the viceral enjoyment of the whole thing.

He also lets fly completely on a negative image of all things Carthaginian, which would have been true to his times. Some modern scholars are starting to doubt many of the nasty things we've assumed about Carthage all these years. Some are starting to ask just how much of that stuff is Roman propaganda. I don't have any answers or opinions myself, and this didn't detract from my enjoyment of the book one way or the other. I did also enjoy a recent novel, Pride of Carthage, which doesn't exactly paint a rosy picture of Carthage, but might give a slightly more full bodied consideration of both sides. I recommend it highly.

And I recommend this. Not exactly cause it's great though. Like I said, it's a banquet, a feast, a debauched evening that gets decidely nasty and that you wake up from feeling rather ill... That doesn't sound that pleasant, does it? And yet we all remember such nights with clouded awe. That's how I'll remember this book.

Worthy of a wider audience.......2004-08-08

Even though I agree with the reviewers who stated that this novel is nothing like Madame Bovary, I tend to see this as a strength of a talented world writer. In this novel Carthage is in its death throes as an imperial nation---eternally at war and unable to meet the daily needs of its citizens. They are forced to believe in an ecstatic religious cult that demands the sacrifice of humans. Flaubert's language in this novel even mirrors the internal frenzy of the citizens who always have to be prepared for yet another war. (I finished this novel in one day, I could not put it down.)
Salammbo needs to be read as a novel; not as a work of history in order to truly understand what Flaubert intentions were.

A blood bath with little feeling........2004-03-08

Death, mayhem, blood, torture, and no sympathetic characters; except, perhaps, the poor. The characters are petty, dishonest, conniving, and superstitious. The forward suggested that Flaubert had something that he needed to get out of his system, with this writing, in order to move on to better things; and I think that is true. But the book is probably more representative of the nature of most wars than say the Lord of the Rings, or such. No one is really fighting, here, for a value system or such and war is hell as Flaubert enthusiastically depicts; no glory here. Although Flaubert hoped for an historical fiction, the forward claims he falls far short of it and the book should be read as a simple fiction.
Salammbo didn't draw me in until the last fourth, even then it wasn't moving, but that might have been Flaubert's intention (or the translator's fault); the lack of pathos or sentimentality part. The first three fourths was a bit tedious or maybe my exposure to sci-fi in my teens made it all blaze; it reminded me of bad sci-fi.

The love affair(s) were undeveloped and not believable. Some of the actions of these born killers is not credible either.

So maybe the two finger thing was symbolic of civilization's subtle conforming of the masses, and the priests the driving force behind taming the barbarian in all of us as well as those outside. Being part of a civiization/society was seen as a privilage until Rousseau flip flopped the whole concept and made the barbarian the noble one. Okay priviliage is based on fear and oppresion justified by religious superstition. A lot of
sci-fi books have symbolism to ponder.

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madame bovary
not ugly
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very well written and easy to understand
very well written and easy to understand

Madame Bovary (Cliffs Notes)
James L. Roberts
Manufacturer: Cliffs Notes
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0822007800

Book Description

The original CliffsNotes study guides offer expert commentary on major themes, plots, characters, literary devices, and historical background.

With CliffsNotes on Madame Flaubert, you'll gain insight into Gustave Flaubert's novel that was so scandalous, he was brought to trial for immorality. Written in 1857, Madame Bovary is a pointed telling of the protagonist's immoral behavior as she ignores her duties as wife and mother to pursue her superficial romantic ideals. However, many now claim the novel as an integral part of modern European and American fiction and the forerunner and model of the realistic novel.

Show your classmates – and your grade-granting teacher – that you're in the know with literature. You can't miss with chapter summaries, plot explorations, and author insights. Other features that help you study include

A brief synopsis of the novel
Insightful chapter commentaries
Critical essays on major themes, symbolism, style, and more
In-depth character analyses
An interactive quiz to test your knowledge
Essay topics and review questions

Classic literature or modern modern-day treasure – you'll understand it all with expert information and insight from CliffsNotes study guides.

Customer Reviews:

madame bovary.......2000-06-07

An exquisitely written book about Madame Bovary's search for love, and all of the pain and hardships as a result of that search. The book is eloquently written and wonderfully entertaining- making Madame Bovary's character human and real.

not ugly.......2000-04-02

Madame Bovary is a beatufully written satire on bourgeois society. Flaubert puts humor throughout the book through his characters. Each action of the characters has a hint of fakery that is very characterist of Bourgeois society. The book was not written as a guideline of how to live one's life, but a story of the real problems that the people during that time confronted. I would recommend it to anyone that wants to read one of the most well written and thoughtout books.

Ugly.......1999-11-30

I connot say that I recomend this book, to anyone. It is a horrible display of character. Hasn't anyone heard of the ten commandments in this world? First of all thou shalt not covet. Don't be wanting something you can't have! Unlike Madame Bovary if you are living in a situation you don't like you learn to like it. Second, thou shalt not commit adultrey. Oh, wait that is exactly what she did. A couple of times. This book is ugly, and it shouldn't be read by those who are trying to lead a christian life.

very well written and easy to understand.......1999-04-26

As above. The book was very beneficial whilst writting essays

very well written and easy to understand.......1999-04-26

As above. The book was very beneficial whilst writting essays

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