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Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary, often ranked among the greatest novels of all time, is considered Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece, with authors from Henry James to Proust to Nabokov heaping it with praise.
The novel tells the story of Madame Bovary, a commoner wife of a country doctor, and her attempts to escape the drudgery of day-to-day mediocrity by engaging in adulterous affairs and overspending on luxuries. She remains unsatisfied even though her husband adores her and they want for little, and her shallowness eventually leads to their ruin.
Today Madame Bovary, with its careful but charming description of the banality of everyday life, is considered the first great example of literary realism in fiction novels. Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s translation, though over a hundred years old, is remarkably fresh and smooth, and is a pleasure even for modern readers.
425 printed pages
Have you already read it? How did you like it?
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Impressions

  • Gayatre Pillaishared an impression2 years ago
    👍Worth reading

    Masterfully written. Insightful detailing of the times, tragic, ideas of romanticism and enlightenment wonderfully weaved in characters of Madame Bovary and Homais.

  • ajama083shared an impression8 years ago
    🔮Hidden Depths
    💡Learnt A Lot
    🎯Worthwhile

    I am struck perhaps by how tragic it is. How transient life and love and keeping up pretenses are. Even we as the reader are fickle switching our opinions our views on each of the characters, sympathizing first with Charles then Emma and then Charles again.
    What is love?

  • Hossein Gomarshared an impression8 months ago
    👍Worth reading
    🔮Hidden Depths
    💡Learnt A Lot
    🎯Worthwhile
    💞Loved Up
    🚀Unputdownable

    Fantastic

Quotes

  • lukyanovalihas quoted3 years ago
    “Has it ever happened to you,” Léon went on, “to come across some vague idea of one’s own in a book, some dim im­age that comes back to you from afar, and as the com­pletest ex­pres­sion of your own slight­est sen­ti­ment
  • Malina Malinahas quoted9 years ago
    in a stammering voice
  • cropanochiarahas quoted5 months ago
    head­mas­ter

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