Goodreads Mobile | see what your friends are reading

Apr 02, 2011

DeLaina rated it:

This is one of the books that has had a profound effect on my life. The moral? Be happy with what you have and where you are!!! Mme. Bovary fritters away her entire life with thoughts of, "If only X would happen, THEN I could be truly happy" and yet she never is. She gets everything she thinks she wants only to find out she's still not content.

I read this while I was engaged and at the time, thought, "Well, I'll be happier when I'm married, but once I am, then life wil More...

2 comments like (57 people liked it)

Oct 25, 2011

Jeanette rated it:

Oy, the tedium, the drudgery of trying to read this book! I tried to get into this story. Really, I did. It's a classic, right? And everyone else likes it. I kept making myself continue, hoping I could get into the story and figure out what's supposed to be so good about it.
I won't waste any more of my precious reading time on this. It's about a self-absorbed young wife who longs for anyone else's life except her own. When she's in the city, she dreams of the farm. When she's in th More...

8 comments like (34 people liked it)

Mar 27, 2008

Martine rated it:

Like every European teenager who takes French at secondary school, I was supposed to read Madame Bovary when I was seventeen or so. I chose not to, and boy, am I glad I did. I couldn't possibly have done justice to the richness of Flaubert's writing as a seventeen-year-old. Moreover, I probably would have hated the characters so much that I never would have given the book another chance. Which would have been a shame, as it's really quite deserving of the tremendous reputation it has.

More...

10 comments like (45 people liked it)

Jul 05, 2011

Kelly rated it:

Oh, Emma. Emma, Emma, Emma. Darling, why must you make it so easy ? No, dear, (for once) I don’t mean for the men. I mean for everyone else in the world who goes into this book just looking for an excuse to make fun of you. I would say that most people don’t know that much about France, but they do know a few things: that they like their baguettes, their socialism, Sartre, dirrrty dirrty sexy lurrrve and they despise this thing called the bourgeoisie. This book doesn’t really do a thing to dispr More...

39 comments like (47 people liked it)

Sep 22, 2007

Shannon rated it:

Why are all the "great classics" lead by famed female heroines all too often about personal freedom thru means of sexual compromise leading to abject misery and ultimate demise? I realize it's an accurate depiction of culture and times, however why are Bovary and Moll Flanders the memorable matriarchs of classic literature? See my commentary on the Awakening for similar frustrations. Why aren't there more works about strong women making a difference in their own lives if not those o More...

14 comments like (28 people liked it)

Feb 08, 2011

Kat rated it:

Henry James once said, "Madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone; it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment."

That's right. Defies judgment.

I don't know... he looks kind of judgy to me...

Unfortunately, I had to read a translation as my French is nowhere near good enough to read the original. Though I am assured that the prose in the origi More...

36 comments like (24 people liked it)

May 08, 2010

Manny rated it:

Moira posted a terrific review of Rabbit Redux the other day, and it made me realise something I should have noticed years ago. Rabbit Angstrom is Emma Bovary's literary grandson! As Moira says, Updike was deeply influenced by Nabokov, a fact that had somehow passed me by. Nabokov, in his turn, was a disciple of Flaubert; he famously said that he'd read all Flaubert, in the original French, by the time he was 14. So the family tree is clear enough.

It's one of those cases, though, whe More...

21 comments like (21 people liked it)

Aug 31, 2010

notgettingenough rated it:

added 1 September 2010

Oh, I adore this piece of marketing. How Amazon sells Madam B.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: French Erotic Romance Novel: Classic Nude Art Pictures (Romantic Fiction Stories: Love, Seduction & Fantasy)

-------------------------------------------------

A dead man took me to the opera last night. Sitting there I realized you knew you'd be dead by now. But you didn’t know that I’d be as homeless as when you took me More...

10 comments like (9 people liked it)

Jan 22, 2009

Malbadeen rated it:

Yes, the writing occasionally caused me to pause in appreciation for it's efficacy and irony. And true, some of the irritations with character may have been more an issue of realities of that time period rather than ideologies of the author but still, it was a little nauseating to see, once again, woman portrayed as banal nit wits that are so frail the mere thought of romance causes their hearts to twitter and their hands to shake while men pursued academics, culture and conversation.

More...

10 comments like (12 people liked it)

Oct 13, 2007

Núria rated it:

Uno de los libros más deprimentes que he leído nunca. Uno de los pocos que me ha hecho llorar (literalmente). Uno de mis favoritos, a pesar de que leerlo cada vez sea una experiencia devastadora, pero supongo que soy masoquista.

Emma Bovary es un seregoísta, caprichoso e inmaduro, y encima con muy poco criterio. Pero a pesar de todos sus defectos, Emma se hace querer, no sólo porque sea un personaje perfectamente construido, sino porque es apasionada pero está profundamente insatisfe More...

7 comments like (7 people liked it)

Mar 31, 2009

Jason rated it:

The CCLaP 100: In which I read a hundred so-called "classics" for the first time, then determine whether or not they deserve the label. Madame Bovary is book #26 of the series.

The story in a nutshell:
Considered by nearly everyone to be one of the best novels ever written, French cynic Gustave Flaubert's 1857 Madame Bovary (originally published serially in 1856) is one of the first fiction projects in history to be as much a deep "character study" as a vehicle f More...

2 comments like (16 people liked it)

Feb 11, 2008

Katherine rated it:

Just finished this morning. Wow. Wow. WOW. Straight into the all-time top 10.

Emma Bovary, wife of a kind and stable country doctor, longs for the depth of feeling and the hyper-reality she experiences in reading romantic novels or attending the opera, but her reality always falls woefully short. In search of a life where her ideals play out for her, she throws herself into high living and adulterous affairs.

This surprisingly bright and lively novel renders the failure of More...

2 comments like (15 people liked it)

Jul 25, 2008

Trevor rated it:

I’ve just read Bruce Nagle’s review of this book – in which he talks of the benefits of returning to a classic work of fiction after some time so that a ‘different self’ can ‘acquire new insights’ into a much loved work. If I didn’t have so much else to read this beautiful comment would be enough to make me take up this book again. I remember so loving this book when I first read it that it would be no hardship to read it again.

It is odd the things that get associated with books in More...

2 comments like (10 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Dot rated it:

This is kind of embarrassing. I think I really wanted to be like a literary character when I was a teenager, so I made myself identify with Emma Bovary. We had nothing in common. I was pretty much celibate most of my high school years and really kind of disinterested in romance. She, on the other hand, was love-starved and I'm pretty sure she fucked everyone in the book. Just no alignment whatsoever. But I'm glad I got over that.

This book was alright. I don't really remember what wen More...

5 comments like (10 people liked it)

Apr 26, 2011

Lavinia rated it:

Some random thoughts:

- I fail to see the book's obscenity (reason for trial when it was first published), still, we are some 150 years later;
- Emma is bland and a little stupid. Here, I said it. I didn't like anything about her as a woman. You don't want to get me started. I wondered, throughout the book, why she is so many people's favourite female character. Still beats me. Of course anyone can relate (I've put myself in her shoes as an exercise, it's not comfortable) - human More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jun 04, 2008

Cendri rated it:

This was the first book I read on my new Kindle (a birthday present). This is totally irrelevant to the book, but it was a "novel" experience, so I thought I'd share :)

I'd tried to read M. Bovary once before and failed utterly. This time it clicked. As I've gotten older, I've gotten more cynical, more critical of unabashed love. All those movies where the guy gets the girl and they kiss and hug and walk off into the sunset - I now wonder: what happens later? If we chec More...

2 comments like (4 people liked it)

Feb 04, 2008

shuurei rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Oct 10, 2011

RandomAnthony rated it:

Madame Bovary, until I noticed the novel on the library shelf on a restless Friday afternoon, lived in a murky part of my brain that convoluted Balzac, Henry James, Les Miserables, and Merchant/Ivory films into a “Flaubert is like that” misconception. Also, I thought the book was at least seven hundred pages long. And I spelled “Madame” as “Madam” in all previous correspondence about the novel. My perceptions couldn't have been more off. Madame Bovary is excellent, falling short of a five st More...

27 comments like (19 people liked it)

Dec 07, 2011

Jeremy added it

I'm not big on books about 19th century domestic life, but damn, I found this hard to put down. Flaubert is a fierce writer, and he's able to generate an entire little world with these deft, precisely chosen details and descriptions. I found Madame Bovary to be cinematic, you can see almost every scene playing out in your head, and there are some really ass-kicking set pieces to boot. I don't think anyone ever invested an agricultural fair with so much pathos; even the part where they go to the More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 18, 2008

Helen (Helena/Nell) rated it:

Madame Bovary is such a strange book! It was one of five novels on the preliminary reading-list sent out to students just before I started a degree in English Literature at the University of York (England) more than thirty-five years ago. Good god—what a thought! The others on the list were Scarlet and Black, Anna Karenina, Great Expectations and Middlemarch. An amazing set. I galloped through them (I used to read faster in those days), and then I forgot Madame Bovary completely.

A c More...

6 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 03, 2008

Taka rated it:

A perfect novel?

That's what the critics say. Some reviewers are more honest. They say it's admirably boring. The critics snub at them and say they don't understand the true literary value of the novel.

I for one found the first 140 pages supremely boring, with page after page of static descriptions and summaries of what happened. As a modern reader, I would've liked more scenes, but more than that, I wanted more drama. The novel may accurately and vividly depict what the p More...

2 comments like (9 people liked it)

May 18, 2008

Steve rated it:

A masterful examination of what happens when a young woman reared on idiotic and impossible romantic notions of marriage marries a country doctor with simple tastes and small ambitions. She envisions married life as a state that will be full of passion, mystery and exoticism, and is unsurprisingly let down when the reality doesn't measure up to her absurd expectations. She has neither the intelligence nor the practicality to see marriage for what it is-an practical agreement between two indivi More...

5 comments like (4 people liked it)

May 03, 2008

David rated it:

Flaubert is da bomb! Seriously, Who knew? I suppose if I had done French, rather than German, in high school I would have discovered Madame Bovary before now. Better late than never.

Obviously, I knew what Madame Bovary was about before reading it. But I had no idea how brilliantly Flaubert would suck me in to the story. He pulls no punches, just lets the story unfold to its horrifying, inexorable conclusion. What I hadn't expected were his unerring eye for the details of the life of More...

1 comment like (5 people liked it)

Jul 22, 2008

Adrienne rated it:

Like many other reviewers I was supposed to read this book in high school, but I'm glad I skipped class because I may not have reread it now as an adult and that would have been my great loss.

It took me awhile to get into the book but I pressed on out of a duty to good literature. Once I really got into it, I really started seeing Flaubert for the genius that he was.

Flaubert's treatment of religion was very interesting to me. Using Homais the chemist as his mouthpie More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Sep 28, 2007

Lily rated it:

I really loved this book. It has to be in my list of favorite books that I've read.

I think the author wanted to make you, as the reader, dislike Emma Bovary because she didn't fit the 'ideal' stereotypical virtuous woman of the time, but I just couldn't. Emma's trials and tribulations begin with her unsatisfying marriage to Charles the doctor.

Charles, who is presented as almost a kind of simpleton early in the book, is a plain kind of man with very plain (and I think Fl More...

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 07, 2007

ruzmarì rated it:

It's not hard to find a nineteenth-century novel that depicts the world of ordinary people ruined by ambitions beyond their station, but Madame Bovary might just be the best of the bunch. Emma Bovary is a bizarre and dubious heroine, frustrated with her lot in life and her husband's complacent mulishness about things. She has affairs, spends money lavishly - money she doesn't have -, racks up thousands of francs of debt, pushes her husband Charles to perform surgeries outside his capabilities, More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 08, 2007

Kitty-Wu rated it:

Atención!!! Destripo libro!!! No seguir leyendo si aún no lo has leído

Madame Bovary ha pasado a la historia, además de por estar maravillosamente escrito, por haber creado uno de los personajes más recordados de la literatura. Madame Bovary es lo que es porque representa un prototipo de mujer diferente, especialmente si la situamos en su tiempo y contexto. Es una mujer rebelde, apasionada, que se opone a la mediocridad, y que, además, comete adulterio.

Hasta aquí bien, per More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 04, 2009

terrycojones rated it:

OK, just to prove I don't love all books, don't write breathless reviews of everything.... time to say something nasty.

I hate Madame Bovary.

I just can't see what all the fuss is about. Maybe it's beautiful in French - I read it in English.

Seems there are 2 kinds of readers: ones that love MB and ones that don't. The latter are in a very small minority. It's one of my literary due diligence questions.

I just didn't get it. Emma Bovary is an idiot. Th More...

3 comments like (9 people liked it)

Sep 20, 2010

Regine rated it:

I really enjoyed Madame Bovary. What's interesting is that I read it with a group of other women, and we all had such different opinions about the book.

Madame Bovary was written by Flaubert in the mid 19th century. Flaubert was well known for being a perfectionist with his writing. Apparently, when he wrote Madame Bovary, he would always be looking for "le mot juste" or "the right word". It really does show in his writing. He uses words effectively and More...

8 comments like (5 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Rob rated it:

This novel was like arsenic poisoning with page numbers. An effete precursor to The Bridges of Madison County (or so I would imagine). Even taken in context it fails to satisfy in either an aesthetic or intellectual capacity. As I recall from class, we did a review of some coded color symbols; I guess that was supposed to make it significant. (Not so much.)

1 comment like (6 people liked it)