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Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics) Paperback – December 31, 2002
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For this novel of French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, Flaubert invented a paradoxically original and wholly modern style. His heroine, Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. A succès de scandale in its day, Madame Bovary remains a powerful and scintillating novel.
This Penguin Classics edition is translated with notes and an introduction by Geoffrey Wall. It includes a preface by Michele Roberts.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
- Print length335 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Classics
- Publication dateDecember 31, 2002
- Reading age18 years and up
- Dimensions7.8 x 5.08 x 0.91 inches
- ISBN-100140449124
- ISBN-13978-0140449129
- Lexile measure920L
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About the Author
Geoffrey Wall is author of the critically acclaimed Flaubert: A Life and translated Madame Bovary for Penguin Classics.
Michèle Roberts is the author of ten highly praised novels.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
We were in the prep-room when the Head came in, followed by a new boy in mufti and a beadle carrying a big desk. The sleepers aroused themselves, and we all stood up, putting on a startled look, as if we had been buried in our work.
The Head motioned to us to sit down.
'Monsieur Roger,' said he in a quiet tone to the prep master, I've brought you a new boy. He's going into the second. If his conduct and progress are satisfactory, he will be put up with the boys of his own age. '
The new boy had kept in the background, in the corner behind the door, almost out of sight. He was a country lad of about fifteen, and taller than any of us. His hair was clipped straight across the forehead, like a village choirboy's. He seemed a decent enough fellow, but horribly nervous. Although he was not broad across the shoulders, his green cloth jacket, with its black buttons, looked as if it pinched him under the arms and revealed, protruding well beyond the cuffs, a pair of raw, bony wrists, obviously not unaccustomed to exposure. His legs, encased in blue stockings, issued from a pair of drab-coloured breeches, very tightly braced. He had on a pair of thick, clumsy shoes, not particularly well cleaned and plentifully fortified with nails.
The master began to hear the boys at their work. The newcomer listened with all his ears, drinking it in as attentively as if he had been in church, not daring to cross his legs or to lean his elbows on the desk, and when two o'clock came and the bell rang for dismissal, the master had to call him back to earth and tell him to line up with the rest of us.
It was our custom, when we came in to class, to throw our caps on the floor, in order to have our hands free. As soon as ever we got inside the door, we 'buzzed' them under the form, against the wall, so as to kick up plenty of dust. That was supposed to be 'the thing.' Whether he failed to notice this manoeuvre or whether he was too shy to join in it, it is impossible to say, but when prayers were over he was still nursing his cap. That cap belonged to the composite order of headgear, and in it the heterogeneous characteristics of the busby, the Polish shapska, the bowler, the otterskin toque and the cotton nightcap were simultaneously represented. It was, in short, one of those pathetic objects whose mute unloveliness conveys the infinitely wistful expression we may sometimes note on the face of an idiot. Ovoid in form and stiffened with whalebone, it began with a sort of triple line of sausage-shaped rolls running all round its circumference; next, separated by a red band, came alternate patches of velvet and rabbit-skin; then a kind of bag or sack which culminated in a stiffened polygon elaborately embroidered, whence, at the end of a long, thin cord, hung a ball made out of gold wire, by way of a tassel. The cap was brand-new, and the peak of it all shiny.
'Stand up,' said the master.
He stood up, and down went his cap. The whole class began to laugh.
He bent down to recover it. One of the boys next to him jogged him with his elbow and knocked it down again. Again he stooped to pick it up.
'You may discard your helmet,' said the master, who had a pretty wit.
A shout of laughter from the rest of the class quite put the poor fellow out of countenance, and so flustered was he that he didn't know whether to keep it in his hand, put it on the floor or stick it on his head. He sat down and deposited it on his knees.
'Stand up,' said the master again, 'and tell me your name.'
In mumbling tones the new boy stammered out something quite unintelligible.
'Again!'
Again came the inarticulate mumble, drowned by the shouts of the class.
'Louder!' rapped out the master sharply. 'Speak up!'
Whereupon the boy, in desperation, opened his jaws as wide as they would go and, with the full force of his lungs, as though he were hailing somebody at a distance, fired off the word 'Charbovari.'
In an instant the class was in an uproar. The din grew louder and louder, a ceaseless crescendo crested with piercing yells--they shrieked, they howled, they stamped their feet, bellowing at the top of their voices: 'Charbovari! Charbovari!' Then, after a while, the storm began to subside. There would be sporadic outbreaks from time to time, smothered by a terrific effort, or perhaps a titter would fizz along a whole row, or a stifled explosion sputter out here and there, like a half-extinguished fuse.
However, beneath a hail of 'impositions,' order was gradually restored. The master--who had had it dictated, spelled out and read over to him--had at length succeeded in getting hold of the name of Charles Bovary, and forthwith he ordered the hapless wretch to go and sit on the dunce's stool, immediately below the seat of authority. He started to obey, stopped short and stood hesitating.
'What are you looking for?' said the master.
'My ca--' began the new boy timidly, casting an anxious glance around him.
An angry shout of 'Five hundred lines for the whole class' checked, like the Quos ego, a fresh outburst. 'Stop your noise, then, will you?' continued the master indignantly, mopping his brow with a handkerchief which he had produced from the interior of his cap.
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Classics; Revised edition (December 31, 2002)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 335 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0140449124
- ISBN-13 : 978-0140449129
- Reading age : 18 years and up
- Lexile measure : 920L
- Item Weight : 9.5 ounces
- Dimensions : 7.8 x 5.08 x 0.91 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #742,349 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,760 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- #17,368 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #35,329 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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But this sordid plot is contained in a novel that is satirical, even comic, portraying the complex pettiness inherent in the book's second title, PROVINCIAL LIVES. Flaubert hilariously counterpoints Emma's first steps towards adultery, for instance, with the speechifying of some petty functionary at an agricultural fair. In addition to Emma's mediocre doctor husband Charles, and her two lovers (the infatuated Léon and the libertine Rodolphe), the author includes many peripheral characters who together make up a portrait of small-town society, from the self-aggrandizing apothecary Homais to the draper and usurious money-lender Lheureux. But Flaubert can also temper his satirical edge in magnificent descriptions of scenes ranging from a village market to a provincial opera performance. [While I am in no position to say if the Penguin translation by Geoffrey Wall is better or worse than the others available, it is certainly good enough to give me much enjoyment in these passages, and is faithful to the French text of those sections that I have compared.]
Though tied to a particular place and time, the social and commercial elements of the story come across with startling modernity. It is, as I say, a little difficult to recapture the physical eroticism that so shocked its original readers, but its psychological aspect is still acute. Indeed, whether fully-fleshed or sketched in, the psychology of Flaubert's characters always rings true. For all that, Flaubert always has the air of writing from the outside, even when talking about Emma. The result is to show a story of decline that is all too plausible, and which leaves one helpless to intervene. The Bovary story may end in tragedy, but the provincial comedy that contains it continues unruffled on its petty course.
Then again perhaps the point of the novel is to show us how banal life is when one cannot find anything meaningful beyond oneself. Instead of being tragic, I found the both of their deaths as pointless as their lives. The fact that neither is any worse than the miserable people that surround them is the best thing left to say..
In that sense, the novel serves a useful purpose in that it reveals that a full life involves more than satisfying one's own appetites as Emma attempts to do and the folly of basing one's happiness on an unworthy object of adoration as he does. I recommend reading it as forerunner of so much of today's entertainment built on unsympathetic characters facing the consequences of their vapid choices. The art of the novel lies in Flaubert's ability to convey that message without appearing to preach.
I could not give a better rating to this edition however due to what appeared to be either a rather poor translation, or VERY poor proof reading. I found this extremely annoying. Nonetheless, it would be a shame if this fact deterred someone from reading Madame Bovary, so I would recommend perhaps trying a different edition.
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Reviewed in Mexico on November 20, 2020