5/29/2023 0 Comments Madame bovary bookAnd she found her own existence unbearable. There was nothing else expected of her- not to work, not to travel, not to do anything much at all, other than to exist. She married her husband, moved to Tostes, had a daughter. But as I read, I was struck by the overwhelming sense of restriction and smallness in Emma’s life. What surprised me, is that whenever I used to read anything about the book, the emphasis was always on the novel reading that corrupts Emma. But love for Madame Bovary is not so much the heroine, tragic as she is in all her unfulfilled longings. It’s the sort of novel that makes one fall in love with novels all over again. I would really love to read at least some passages of it in the original… and I have downloaded in French onto my Kindle. I read it in Polish translation and it made me double-up on my efforts of improving my French. If not for Nabokov’s essay about Madame Bovary in his Lectures on Literature, I’m not sure I would have reached for it at all. It sounded like a tragic version of Northanger Abbey. It was mentioned to me so many times as the story of a married woman who gets corrupted by reading too many romances… well, I was fairly blasée about it. Do you know how sometimes you’ve been told a certain book is a classic so many times that you roughly know the details of the plot and think to yourself „well, what’s the big deal”? This was me and Madame Bovary.
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