Madame Bovary

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Author: Gustave Flaubert
Acquired in: May 2020


While I was going through Pinterest one day, a pin piqued my curiosity. It gave a list of books to read, written by authors of different nationalities. For example, for France, it was this book. So when I saw Madame Bovary in one of my favourite book haunts a few weeks later, it took me only a second to buy.

Set in France in the 1800s, Emma Rouault is a young woman with her head turned by romantic notions. Lonely in a farmhouse with only her father for company, she craves the passionate life the characters in dramas lead and waits impatiently for some excitement in her placid life. That excitement comes in the form of Charles Bovary, a medical officer tired of his unpleasant wife, Heloise. After Heloise's death, Charles marries Emma and loves her to distraction. Yet Emma, who now faces the dull drudgery of rural life, realises with a rude shock that being married was far from the blissful life she admired in books and has only walled her in with her unfulfilled ideals. Desperate for some way to vent her anguish, she takes up numerous ventures, all of which backfire and eventually lands herself and her unsuspecting family in great danger. 


Madame Bovary might as well be the French counterpart of Mrs Dalloway, excluding the fact that Emma Bovary was more flamboyant and reckless than the sensible Clarissa Dalloway. The synopsis on the back of the book called her the original desperate housewife and I couldn't agree more. Despite her horrible end, I feel that no fate could have been worse than Charles' and her daughter Berthe's. The epilogue reveals that the unfortunate child faced a terrible future in the workhouse and was all alone in the world. 


Reading this book left me quite depressed. Even though a different ending would have not fit in with the realist theme, I would have liked to see even a thin bit of silver lining. It is well-written and has a gripping narrative, but if you have enough gloom and doom currently, I would say that this book can wait until the clouds disperse.


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