Synopsis
A guide to reading "Madame Bovary" with a critical and appreciative mind encouraging analysis of plot, style, form, and structure. Also includes background on the author's life and times, sample tests, term paper suggestions, and a reading list.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2009-09-25 |
| Size | | Length: | 305 pages | | Height: | 8.3 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 14.4 oz |
Industry Reviews
"Consider Emma in the light of suburban life today. She is bored with a devoted husband, whom she chose for herself; she is bored with her child, except when she chooses to play the role of loving mother; she is demanding, capricious, extravagant, self-pitying, sentimental, hard and totally selfish. But all of these things flow from her idleness. She is beautiful and intelligent....What destroys her is the combination of this cheaply romantic, self-dramatizing habit of mind and the dullness and emptiness of a provincial village life....The imagination of an Emma is always one step ahead of her circumstances."
New York Times Book Review - Louis Auchincloss (07/17/1966)
"Flaubert, by a single phrase--a notation of some commonplace object--can convey all the poignance of human desire, the pathos of human defeat; his description of some homely scene will close with a dying fall that reminds one of great verse or music."
Edmund Wilson
"...Possibly the most beautiful book ever composed; undoubtedly the most beautifully written novel....A book that invites superlatives....The most important novel of this century."
Frank O'Connor
"Madame Bovary [is my favorite book]...because the writing is absolutely precise and simply perfect. This book was a considerable turning point in fiction, an innovation."
Washington Post Book World - John Cheever (03/09/1969)
"When we consider the great novels of the last century...and when, from the fabric of a 'Madame Bovary', we take the following, one by one: characters, their development, situations, plot, subject, content--after such a subtraction, a second-rate literature of entertainment will have nothing left. But a 'Madame Bovary'...will still retain the cardinal thing--the characterization of reality almost as a philosophical entity, universally shared, experienced by us all as a changeless companion."
unpublished letter to "Encounter" magazine - Boris Pasternak (08/22/1959)
"Emma Bovary is deluded by literature. Because she is in search of ecstasy and transcendence, she falls madly in love with a cad, then with a coward, ignoring the plodding husband and child who both adore her. She is looking for a higher, more spiritual life than the one available to her as the wife of a bourgeois country doctor, and in this quest she finds only self-destruction."
Salon - Erica Jong (09/15/1997)
"An interviewer asked me what book I thought best represented the modern American woman. All I could think of to answer was: 'Madame Bovary'."
"Characters in Fiction" - Mary McCarthy
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vICBKw-sytelQ~~_7.JPG "Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (2009, Paperback)")
vICBKw-sytelQ~~_32.JPG "Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (2009, Paperback)")
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