![]() At the end all the tragic, tortured revelations, one glaring irony has a woman coming to collect a debt for Emma's lessons (lessons never taken but used as a cover up to her husband). So well written, you love and pity Emma, feel sorry for Charles and loathe the symbolic money lender for giving her the ability to do it all. Hours and hours of listening feeling like I was watching Emma coming apart and taking down the entire cast with her. The ending of the book is very dark, but realistic.Divina Porter gave so much life to Madame Bovary, and of course with no small contribution by its author, the book has a permanent position in my mental book shelf. In order to finance the tissue of lies she's concocted to carry on her affairs, Emma makes an association with a dry goods merchant who plays with her like a fish on a line, loaning her sums of money and coaxing her to sign promissory notes which eventually come due. He's a pompous twit who has a number of comic monologues. Serving as sort of a Greek chorus is Homais, the apothecary, who is the Bovarys' next door neighbor. Leon, the young law clerk, is too immature to know what he wants. ![]() Rodolphe, the gentleman farmer, has ignoble intentions toward her from the start. Her sadness allows to to place her hopes for a better life successively, in two adulterous affairs. Her unhappiness comes not only from her dissatisfaction with her dull, unambitious husband and the life they share, but also from her awareness of the lack of freedom experienced by women in her society. With him she relocates to a small town where everybody knows everybody, has a child, and of course, becomes very unhappy. She ends up marrying Charles Bovary, a barely competent physician, and a dull man in the bargain. Music, art, romance, the company of cultured people. Not only that, but it's an early feminist novel!Įmma Roualt is a farm girl who has been given a good convent education by her father. ![]() This novel is so psychologically realistic, the result of such careful observation of human behavior, that it's amazing it came out in the mid-nineteenth century. Then I heard about Lydia Davis's new, highly touted translation through the New York Times book review podcast. ![]() ![]() I had attempted this book a couple year ago, but was confounded by a bad translation. ![]()
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