Madame Bovary
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3.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
One of the world’s most celebrated novels, soon to be a major motion picture starring Mia Wasikowska
This indelible portrait of a beautiful woman’s aching lust for more—more romance, more glamour, more fun—and her resulting tragic demise, is widely considered one of the finest novels ever written. Flaubert’s refusal to condemn his adulterous heroine, a woman trapped as much by circumstance as by her own boundless desires, scandalized nineteenth-century France and resulted in a trial on charges of obscenity. But it is the beauty of the novel’s prose, the great care it takes with characters major and minor, and the relentless but elegant thrust of its narrative, that puts Madame Bovary in a class by itself.
In the story of a provincial doctor and his wife’s tawdry affairs, Gustave Flaubert found the stuff of great literature. A perfect novel about imperfect people, Madame Bovary is the rare classic that exceeds expectations and feels as fresh now as it did the day it was written.
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Glenda Jackson hits the mark in this superb narration of Flaubert's classic novel. Her reading perfectly captures the restlessness of Emma Bovary, a character perpetually dissatisfied with her solid, steady husband and bourgeois life in provincial 19th-century France. Emma's unrealistic dreams (she yearns for a perfect, romantic love that will sweep her away into perpetual bliss) lead her into one affair after another, and then to financial ruin and suicide. Jackson is especially outstanding in the scene which takes place the night before Emma plans to run off with her lover, Rudolf. To Rudolf, Emma is just one in a long series of conquests, and he gets cold feet at the thought of being permanently responsible for her welfare and that of her child. In a swoony, sighing voice full of noble suffering, Jackson reads his flowery letter of tears and regret, saying he loves her too much to ruin her life and her reputation. Then, without missing a beat, she switches to smug, cynical satisfaction, as Rudolf admires the letter and congratulates himself on his close escape.
