Madame Bovary

In the early part of the nineteenth century, Emma, a farmer's daughter from a tiny rural French village, consents to marry Charles Bovary, a cheerfully mediocre country doctor who fell in love with her while treating her father's broken leg. Emma has grown up an avid reader of romances and sentimental poetry; her head is full of passionate, idyllic expectations to which the humble realities of her life as Madame Bovary fail utterly to measure up. She sinks into a deep depression, spends profligately to assuage her existential boredom, and embarks on a series of adulterous affairs as she nurses an ever-deepening contempt for her adoring but unexciting husband.

I enormously enjoyed almost all of this book. I say "almost" because the ending was not enjoyable at all, but I admire and respect and agree with the way everything concluded even if it didn't exactly spark joy. Honestly, if there is such a thing as a perfect novel, this one might just be that; every part of it is executed smoothly, effectively and with magnificent literary flare.

I cannot overstate the loveliness of Flaubert's prose. I read it in English (the 1886 Eleanor Marx-Aveling version, specifically) but even in translation it was impossible not to appreciate how clean and finely tuned the use of language is. There's a cinematic quality to everything, a vivid precision, that fills each scene to bursting with evocative imagery but never once tips over into excess. The writing is also unflaggingly witty and wry, but in an understated way, not harsh or cynical; Madame Bovary receives no quarter for her terrible decisions but I also never felt like Flaubert lacked compassion for her.

On the contrary, her downfall arises from the most painfully human emotional state: she takes for granted what she has, and exaggerates the value of what she doesn't. The life Emma Bovary was born to was one of comfortable ordinariness: she is secure but not wealthy, clever but not brilliant, loved warmly and unconditionally but without passion. But her peaceful life is worthless to her, and the idea of happiness being derived from within never even seems to occur to her. She craves drama, romance, specialness, and feels hard done by when life fails to deliver it to her. She attributes her feelings of emptiness and dissatisfaction to some inadequacy of her life circumstances: if she only possessed XYZ trappings of wealth, or if only a suitably passionate lover arrived to sweep her off her feet, all her misery would evaporate and she'd finally experience true happiness. And when the expensive goods and the torrid affairs fail to make her happy, instead of realising the fundamental flaw in her philosophy, she doubles down harder and keeps chasing that next, bigger, stronger hit that will surely satisfy her hunger at last.

Flaubert is extremely funny about the disconnect between Madame Bovary's pretensions and her material life circumstances. I want to quote the whole several pages in which a lover's impassioned declarations to her are interwoven with the proceedings of a local agricultural fair going on outside the window of their love-nest, but I'll satisfy myself with this short excerpt:

'Thus we,' he said, 'why did we come to know one another? What chance willed it? It was because across the infinite, like two streams that flow but to unite, our special bents of mind had driven us towards each other.'
And he seized her hand; she did not withdraw it.
'For good farming generally!' cried the president.
'Just now, for example, when I went to your house-'
'To Monsieur Bizat of Quincampoix-'
'Did I know I should accompany you?'
'Seventy francs.'
'A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you - I remained.'
'Manures!'
'And I shall remain tonight, tomorrow, all other days, all my life!'
'To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold medal!'

The whole book is in this tone, more or less. It's utterly delightful.