Madame Bovary A Tale of Provincial Life

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Madame Bovary A Tale of Provincial Life

Product Description 'Alles, was sie unmittelbar umgab: die eintönige Landschaft, die kleinlichen armseligen Spießbürger, ihr ganzes Durchschnittsdasein kam ihr wie ein Winkel der eigentlichen Welt vor. Er existierte zufällig, und sie war in ihn verbannt. Aber draußen vor seinen Toren, da begann das weite, weite Reich der Seligkeiten und Leidenschaften.'Gustave Flaubert zeichnet in seinem berühmtesten Werk das Porträt einer Frau, die vergebens versucht, durch Liebschaften der Enge ihrer Welt zu entkommen. Besonders wegen seiner Sprache ist es ein Meisterwerk der Erzählkunst. Der Autor schuf mit 'Madame Bovary' den modernen, realistischen Roman. Er entfachte damals einen Skandal.Flaubert über seine Titelfigur: 'Madame Bovary – das bin ich.'Neu edierte Übersetzung mit erläuternden Hinweisen. Review Acclaim for Lydia Davis and her translation of "Swann's Way" "[Her] capacity to make language unleash entire states of existence reveals the extent to which Davis's fiction is influenced by her work as a translator." -"The New York Times" "Few writers now working make the words on the page matter more." -Jonathan Franzen "Davis is the best prose stylist in America." -Rick Moody ""Swann's Way" is transformed into something even more enchanting in Lydia Davis's new translation." -"Vanity Fair" "Davis is closer, "much" closer, to Proust's French. . . . [Her] "Swann's Way" is one of those translations . . . that put the question of "languages" out of your mind, and leave you only with questions of "language."" -"The Village Voice" "Accessible and faithful to Proust. Davis replicates the hesitations and digressions, the backward looks and forward glances that swell Proust's sentences and send them cascading to their conclusion-without s From AudioFile This nineteenth-century novel tells the story of a young woman who takes desperate measures to escape her stultifying marriage and provincial life, with tragic results. Simon Vance's leisurely reading mirrors the pace of small-town life, and his clear, gentle voice, with its lovely timbre, seems especially suited to delivering the text's many descriptive passages. As for the dialogue, his voicing of youthful Emma Bovary sounds a bit strained in places, but it's always expressive, and he does a solid job with the various male characters. Particularly amusing is his portrayal of Monsieur Homais, the voluble village chemist who fancies himself a learned man, and this brings some welcome comic relief to an otherwise tragic story. A.E.B. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine About the Author Known for his scrupulous devotion to his art and perfectionist style, French writer Gustave Flaubert is counted among the greatest Western novelists, and influenced such writers as Franz Kafka and J. M. Coetzee. Flaubert is best known for Madame Bovary, for which he was prosecuted (and acquitted) for offending public morals. His other works of note include Memoirs of a Madman, November, Salammb?, Sentimental Education, and The Temptation of Saint Anthony. His work has been widely adapted for the stage and screen. Flaubert died in 1880. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From Chris Kraus’s Introduction to Madame BovaryFlaubert has often been credited as being the Father of Realism. Madame Bovary, his first and most classically plot-driven novel, has been labeled as “realist” because of—as many critics would have it—the author’s choice to depict “mediocre” and “vulgar” protagonists circling around a subject as “trite” as adultery. Like much criticism, these readings tell us a great deal more about the critics than the novel. Implicit in such statements are the assumptions (a) that there is anything “trite” about the conflict between human desire and the social demand for monogamy—which, as we will see, was applied selectively in Flaubert’s time to the lower reaches of the French middle class; and (b) that the author himself was immune to the trashy and fickle illusions embraced by his characters. Writing in 1964, critic and novelist Mary McCarthy describes Emma Bovary as “a very ordinary middle-class woman with banal expectations of life and an urge to dominate her surroundings. Her character is remarkable only for an unusual deficiency of human feeling” (“Foreword”; see “For Further Reading”). Sensing, perhaps, a need to distance herself from the proto-feminist implications of Emma’s dilemma, the brilliant, prolific McCarthy could only describe her as “trite.” Instead, she chooses to valorize Charles for his unfailing love of his wife—a love that is no less misguided and false than Emma’s romantic illusions. Except for the brief deathbed appearance of Dr. Lariviere, a man who “disdainful of honours, of titles, and of academies . . . generous, fatherly to the poor, and practising virtue without believing in it, . . . would almost have passed for a saint if the keenness of his intellect had not caused him to be feared as a demon” (p. 265), all of Flaubert’s characters are equally flawed and deluded. There is the rapacious, progressive pharmacist Homais and the dull-witted Charles, who loves his young wife for all the wrong reasons. Pleased with himself for possessing such a fine wife, Charles is so completely seduced by Emma’s well-rehearsed feminine wiles—her new way of making paper sconces for candles, the flounces she puts on her gowns, her little wine-red slippers with large knots of ribbon—that he cannot see her unhappiness. There is Emma herself, whose suffering never opens her eyes to the misfortunes of others. Her affairs, and her two lovers themselves, Rodolphe (the seducer) and Leon (the poet of adultery), prove to be equally untrustworthy and disappointing. There is Lheureux, the usurious loan-shark and salesman, and a large cast of pompous officials and idiot villagers. In a novel that is so technically modern and ground-breaking, it is interesting to note that Flaubert draws on the medieval slapstick tradition of naming his characters after their foibles: the Mayor Tuvache (“you cow,” in translation); the booster-ish technocrat Homais (“what man could be”: “homme,” the noun “man,” cast, like a verb, in the future conditional tense); and Lheureux, the purveyor of expensive false dreams, his name taken from the French word for “happiness.” Finally, it is the very idea that romantic love could be conducive to happiness that is most deeply discredited. When Rodolphe makes Emma fall in love with him at Yonville’s agricultural fair, it’s not exactly Rodolphe she falls in love with. When she is caught in his gaze, the little threads of gold in his eyes and the smell of pomade in his hair sets off a rapture of memories of all of the men she’s been in love with. Because she is in love with love, Rodolphe merely serves as a trigger, and at the time this is marvelous. But as the novel moves on, Emma behaves more and more like an addict. By part three, chapter six, when the novelty of her affair with Leon begins fading, Emma summons an imaginary Leon in a letter-writing delirium. “But while she wrote it was another man she saw, a phantom fashioned out of her most ardent memories, her finest reading, her strongest lusts, and at last he became so real, so tangible, that she palpitated wondering, without, however, the power to imagine him clearly, so lost was he, like a god, beneath the abundance of his attributes” (p. 241). After this free-basing binge, Emma “fell back exhausted.” These “transports of love” gave way to a “constant ache all over her.” (In Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania, philosopher Avital Ronell extrapolates from this metaphor with wild perfection.) “There is no goodness in this book,” wrote Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the most eminent critic of Flaubert’s time, in an otherwise favorable review of the novel. And yet the book breathes with compassion. Preparing to write the scene of Emma and Leon’s first meeting, Flaubert describes a strategy that informs the whole book in a letter he wrote in the early 1850s to his sometime-lover and literary confidante, Louise Colet: “My two characters . . . will talk about literature, about the sea, the mountains, music—all well-worn poetical subjects. It will be the first time in any book, I think, that the young hero and the younger heroine are made mock of, and yet the irony will in no way diminish the pathos, but rather intensify it” (The Selected Letters of Gustave Flaubert). From the Author Gustave Flaubert est né le 12 décembre 1821 à Rouen. Dès l'enfance, il connut la monotonie de la vie en province et s'en souviendra lorsqu'il écrira le roman Madame Bovary en 1857 et Le dictionnaire des idées reçues en 1911. Pour tromper son ennui, il s'adonna très tôt à la littérature. Il commença des études de droit à Paris mais du arrêter pour cause d'une maladie nerveuse vers 1844. Il devait en souffrir jusqu'à la fin de son existence. Flaubert était connu comme étant quelqu'un de grande culture, ayant une incroyable capacité de travail et des exigences esthétiques rigoureuses. Dans toute sa carrière, il connut les échecs de librairie avec L'Education Sentimentale, Le Candidat ou La Tentation de Saint Antoine. Cependant, il eut avec Madame Bovary et Salammbô un succès de scandale. Flaubert mourut à Croisset le 8 mai 1880. From the Inside Flap This exquisite novel tells the story of one of the most compelling heroines in modern literature--Emma Bovary.  Unhappily married to a devoted, clumsy provincial doctor, Emma revolts against the ordinariness of her life by pursuing voluptuous dreams of ecstasy and love.  But her sensuous and sentimental desires lead her only to suffering corruption and downfall.  A brilliant psychological portrait, Madame Bovary searingly depicts the human mind in search of transcendence.  Who is Madame Bovary?  Flaubert's answer to this question was superb:  "Madame Bovary, c'est moi."  Acclaimed as a masterpiece upon its publication in 1857, the work catapulted Flaubert to the ranks of the world's greatest novelists.  This volume, with its fine translation by Lowell Bair, a perceptive introduction by Leo Bersani, and a complete supplement of essays and critical comments, is the indispensable Madame Bovary. Review "[Flaubert's] masterwork has been given the English translation it deserves." -Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times Book Review "[A] brilliant new translation." -Lee Siegel, The New York Observer "[Davis] has a finer ear for the natural cadences of English, in narrative and dialogue, than any of her predecessors, and there are many moments in her Madame Bovary when one pauses to admire how clean and spare a sentence seems by comparison with its earlier translated versions. . . . Only a very good writer indeed could have written it. . . . The bones of the original French show clearly through her English, and the rawness of her translation is, on the whole, invigorating." -Jonathan Raban, The New York Review of Books "How tickled Madame Bovary herself would be by the latest homage paid to her. . . . I'm grateful to Davis for luring me back to Madame Bovary and for giving us a version which strikes me as elegant and alive." -Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air "Flaubert's obsessive masterpiece finally gets the obsessive translation it deserves." -New York "Davis is the best fiction writer ever to translate the novel. . . . [Her] work shares the Flaubertian virtues of compression, irony and an extreme sense of control. . . . Davis's Madame Bovary is a linguistically careful version, in the modern style, rendered into an unobtrusively American English." -Julian Barnes, London Review of Books "Davis captures with precision the sensitivity of the novel's language. . . . [Her] version . . . ultimately demonstrates her own empathy with Emma." -The New Republic "At last, the real Madame Bovary . . . The publication of the Davis version is an event. . . . Davis has come closer than any previous translator to capturing Flaubert's style and content accurately for English-language readers. . . . Her version benefits from her finesse as a writer and seems fresh and different compared to other translations." -The American Spectator "Davis has produced a very fine [translation that] displays a cool detachment not at all dissimilar to Flaubert's own." -The New Criterion "Davis [is] operating in top form in her new translation of Madame Bovary. . . . I was struck delirious by the force of Flaubert's writing, and the precision (the perfection) of Davis's translation." -Macy Halford, The New Yorker's Book Bench "Davis's edition should bring a new generation to Flaubert's classic of bourgeois ennui and adultery." -Newsday "A new translation that spans the ages [and] hews as close to the original as may be possible. . . . Davis's translation strives for-and largely achieves-the flavor of Flaubert's realism. . . . It provides such an unfussy, straightforward narrative that it underscores how truly modern a writer Flaubert was." -BookPage "Davis has forged a masterpiece out of a masterpiece. . . . This Madame Bovary is a veritable page-turner. . . . In French, the story leapt out at me like a hallucinatory Technicolor poem; in the lapidary English of Lydia Davis, I receive the same frisson of recognition-that the novel still lives. . . . Thanks to Lydia Davis, the book remains: a great, companionlike, eternal gilded mirror of Flaubert's world." -Neil Baldwin, The Faster Times "Davis . . . does a brilliant job of capturing Flaubert's diamond-hard style. . . . Davis's English prose has precisely the qualities she notes that Flaubert was striving for in French; it is 'clear and direct, economical and precise.' This translation reminds you what an aggressively modern writer Flaubert is." -Kirkus Reviews "[Davis] is one of the most innovative prose stylists of our time, and thus an excellent match for Flaubert's masterpiece. Flaubert's sentences are certainly sonorous in French, and the sentences in this translation reveal a similar attention to sound. . . . We are in debt to Flaubert for his influence on much of the writing we have today; the extent of our debt has never been so clear." -The Believer Acclaim for Lydia Davis and her translation of Swann's Way "[Her] capacity to make language unleash entire states of existence reveals the extent to which Davis's fiction is influenced by her work as a translator." -The New York Times "Few writers now working make the words on the page matter more." -Jonathan Franzen "Davis is the best prose stylist in America." -Rick Moody "Swann's Way is transformed into something even more enchanting in Lydia Davis's new translation." -Vanity Fair "Davis is closer, much closer, to Proust's French. . . . [Her] Swann's Way is one of those translations . . . that put the question of languages out of your mind, and leave you only with questions of language." -The Village Voice "Accessible and faithful to Proust. Davis replicates the hesitations and digressions, the backward looks and forward glances that swell Proust's sentences and send them cascading to their conclusion-without sacrificing the natural air of his style." -Los Angeles Times Book Review "Davis is an extraordinary technician of language, capable of revealing elusive human tendencies through the most unusual means." -Bookforum "[Davis] commands language and imagery, playing the reader like a master." -Los Angeles Times "The subtleties of the French language, in spite of their difficulty, hold no secrets from you. . . . No literary genre deters you. You helped to make known to the English-speaking public some of the finest French literature of the century. . . . You have found a way not only to put your many talents at the service of the French language and culture, but also to place your stamp on the literary legacy of our times." -French Insignia of the Order of Arts and Letters citation From the Publisher This exquisite novel tells the story of one of the most compelling heroines in modern literature--Emma Bovary. Unhappily married to a devoted, clumsy provincial doctor, Emma revolts against the ordinariness of her life by pursuing voluptuous dreams of ecstasy and love. But her sensuous and sentimental desires lead her only to suffering corruption and downfall. A brilliant psychological portrait, Madame Bovary searingly depicts the human mind in search of transcendence. Who is Madame Bovary? Flaubert's answer to this question was superb: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." Acclaimed as a masterpiece upon its publication in 1857, the work catapulted Flaubert to the ranks of the world's greatest novelists. This volume, with its fine translation by Lowell Bair, a perceptive introduction by Leo Bersani, and a complete supplement of essays and critical comments, is the indispensable Madame Bovary. From the Back Cover The year 1857 propelled Flaubert into the law courts and into celebrity. It was not exactly the kind of celebrity he had wished for. 'Madame Bovary' had appeared serially in 'La Revue de Paris'. Now the imperial prosecutor was attacking the work for being offensive to religion and morality. Not only the seduction scenes, but the episodes dealing with religion and the description of Emma's death, came under direct censure. More than the subject, the general tone of the novel was denounced as immoral: the pervasive eroticism, the poetry of adultery, the so-called 'realism' of the style. Flaubert, excellently defended by his lawyer, was acquitted. The book was published soon after, benefiting from the advance courtroom publicity.