The cover of the ReadingRate edition of Madame Bovary

ReadingRate edition

Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert, 1857

463 pages · 115,600 words · about 13 hours · regard 93 of 100

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Emma Bovary marries a country doctor and moves to Normandy, where she waits for her life to begin. It never does. She had read too many novels about passion and grandeur, and Yonville — with its pharmacist Homais dispensing opinions, its priest dispensing platitudes, and her husband Charles dispensing unremarkable medical care — offers none of it. She takes lovers. She runs up debts. Neither solves the problem. Flaubert tells her story without sympathy or condemnation, keeping a precise ironic distance that was genuinely new in 1857 and remains difficult to sustain. He invented free indirect discourse — the technique of slipping into a character's thoughts without announcing it — and uses it to let Emma's romantic delusions speak for themselves. The burning wedding bouquet, the cigar case she keeps after the Marquis's ball, the thin shoes she clogs walking to Rodolphe's house: the novel is thick with objects that carry everything she cannot say. What makes Madame Bovary strange is how funny it is — Homais alone could sustain a comedy — while the ending arrives with the weight of a natural disaster. Flaubert took five years to write it. You can feel every sentence.

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