Day Forty

5/10

The Book: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

ISBN: 978-0-7607-9345-9

Suggested By: Brandon Shuler

Where: Home

When: 9:15

Music: None

Company: The Family

Pages: 1-55 (55)

The Lead In: Heard many good things about this book, we shall see if it lives up to the hype. I must say it was name-dropped in my Realism class and this does not make me hopeful...

The 411 on the 55: The book opens with a new pupil, Charles Bovary, attending class. We learn he is a spoiled rich kid who cares little for education and skips all of his classes. Eventually he is booted from school, but with the help of his mother, passes the test and becomes a doctor regardless.

He marries a rich woman, old, and she eventually dies leaving him what she has, but not as much as she had led him to believe. He falls for the daughter of one his patients, Emma. There is a great description of the wedding, in the Realist form.

Emma moves into the new house and begins to come up with ways to improve it. He on the other hand is enamored with her and follows he around like a puppy. She is disappointed to find that marriage doesn’t have the elements she has read about: “passion, rapture, felicity”. She apparently read too many romance novels. After her mother dies, she begins to withdraw more from Charles.

They go to a big party and she is thrilled by the finery, and even more disgusted with the boring nature of her husband. After the party all she can do is think about being elsewhere and dancing, etc.

Line of the Day: “If he asks for her,” he said to himself, “I’ll give her to him.” pg 24

The Fact on the Fiction:  A 2007 poll of contemporary authors, published in a book entitled The Top Ten, cited Madame Bovary as one of the two greatest novels ever written, second only to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Wikipedia