Originally Posted by
Jackson Richardson
I haven't read Madame Bovary for years and I don't have any great yen to do so.
I suspect part of Flaubert's great appeal is his prose style, which you just don't get in translation.
The most recent French classic I read was Balzac's La Cousine Bette, and I found it rather boring and repetitive. I'd have bs basically.een interested in Bette herself, but the principal interest was this dirty old man who just can't help himself having it away with younger women of a slightly lower social class.
Presumably there is mileage in comparing Madame Bovary with Anna Karenina, both being studies of a woman in an adulterous relationship with which she get bored. English readers of the period could not cope with such a situation -adultery is an appalling sin, full stop, and however sympathetic the author is to the women's married state, once she goes with another man, she cannot be described - I'm thinking of Edith Dombey.