Madame Bovary

By: Gustave Flaubert

Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson

In Madame Bovary, one of the great novels of 19th-century France, Flaubert draws a deeply felt and sympathetic portrait of a woman who, having married a country doctor and found herself unhappy with a rural, genteel existence, longs for love and excitement. However, her aspirations and her desires to escape only bring her further disappointment and eventually lead to unexpected, painful consequences. Flaubert’s critical portrait of bourgeois provincial life remains as powerful as ever.

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EXCELLENT!

This was a wonderful read. I will seek more books by Gustave Flaubert! It is a vacation into another world and another time.

Wonderful classic story, well told

The story takes a long time to set up. I almost gave up at the halfway point. However, when the action begins it is a roller coaster to the end. Juliette Stevenson is excellent, as usual.

Excellent narrator, beautiful writing

Would you listen to Madame Bovary again? Why?

Yes, parts.

Which character – as performed by Juliet Stevenson – was your favorite?

Juliet Stevenson is such an excellent narrator. Her readings are at a perfect pace and her character interpretations are always wonderful. Ms. Stevenson's understanding of the text and intelligence make listening a joy. I become so lost in the characters she portrays that I forget it is one person reading! Can't say Emma Bovary is a favorite character, but her self-centeredness and vacuousness come through in the dialogue as read by the narrator.

Any additional comments?

I can understand why this novel is so well known. The writing (and this translation) draw you in. But the characters are not sympathetic and I don't understand why Emma Bovary is so empty and why she expresses no remorse at the end of the novel. I feel for her clueless husband and especially for her daughter Berthe.

Glad I read it again.

I read Madam Bovary in college. Reading it decades later, I realized how little I remembered and why this is a classic book to read and re-read. Mahler was ahead of his tine . He paid dearly for writing what was a scandalous novel at the time.

An interesting take on morality

Where does Madame Bovary rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Fairly high. I liked the performance, and while I hated the heroine, the story was good.

What did you like best about this story?

When Emma suffers for what she has done. I didn't like her much.

What does Juliet Stevenson bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

I liked her inflections for the various characters. It brought things to life. Also, I am terrible at imagining French pronunciations!

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

I may or may not have hissed "YESSSS!" when she was indicted.

Any additional comments?

Does disliking Emma make me a bad feminist?

News Flash: A Masterpiece

What does Juliet Stevenson bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Gorgeous voice. There are a couple of minor editing mistakes in this audio version -- two or three times we'd have a sentence repeated -- but she brings a combination of elegance and clarity that really adds to the experience.

Any additional comments?

I think I thought I’d read Bovary a long time ago. That’s probably because I have read Anna Karenina (and to a lesser extent Chekhov’s “Lady with a Dog”), the other great adulterous novel of the mid-19th century, and I have also read Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart” (in French, no less, thank you Madames Nichols et Bork). It’s also because it’s so entwined in other literature and art that you feel you know it already. It casts the kind of light that makes you think you’ve spent more direct time on it than you have.

So, news flash: this is really good. Flaubert has the gift of the great sentence (even in translation) that he’s famous for. He’ll find the perfect detail or the perfect metaphor. Or, other times, he’ll find the perfect sentence to sum up reveries of one sort or another, and often that sentence will turn what’s come before it on its head.

If Tolstoy is the great Romantic, celebrating the passion that drives Anna’s unhappiness forward, then Flaubert is already a Modernist, someone as intrigued by irony as by the subject before him. That’s true with many of those staggering sentences, of course (he’s like a master painter with brush strokes that speak a consistent language apart from and yet constituting the work as a whole) but it’s also true of his view of Emma. I’d always assumed that we’d be called to root for Emma, that she would be (as Anna in many ways is) a proto-feminist figure whose unhappiness demonstrates the need to reimagine the role of women in society. I think it’s possible to read this that way, but I’m not convinced Flaubert was polemicizing. (And Tolstoy, great as he was, generally was polemicizing about something.)

Instead, I think we are often supposed to judge Emma. I think we are supposed to see her as self-centered and, to take an old-fashioned word then current, immoral. She is scandalous, and she leaves destruction in her wake. Flaubert seems unafraid of her sexuality – there’s great passion here, and it’s fun to imagine the good people of the 1860s and 1870s shocked by its explicit scenes – but he’s also unafraid to judge it. Sure, Charles is a dope, a mediocrity who can’t match her beauty or her intelligence, but we seem to be told here that everything would have turned out all right if only she’d managed to make herself satisfied with what she had. She had the materials for happiness before her, but she had to keep pushing, had to grab for more than was her allotted share.

Anyway, I have almost nothing original to say about this, but then I doubt I’d have anything original to say about visiting the Louvre, something I still hope to do some day. In each case, we’re talking about masterpieces, so there’s nothing wrong with just standing before them, mouth slightly agape, and admiring what’s there.

A novel far ahead of its time. Story of discontent, passion and tragedy

Beautifully written by French writer Gustave Flaubert in mid 19th century. The main character Emma lives beyond her means in order to escape the fullness of rural life.

When this novel was published in 1856, it was attacked by public prosecutors for its “obscenity”. There was a trial and Flaubert was eventually acquitted. This made this a best seller. Not an average sordid affair story as it’s brutal and seems a true story of the time. Must read!!

A profoundly moving book on the nature of Happines

I loved this book. One of the classics. Juliet Stevenson does a phenomenal job with the reading and narration. The book's main theme is a Meditation on the fleeting happiness that come from the world and positions therein. It takes awhile to finish,but stick with it. Its got great payoff.

A little Dickens-ish

Of course Juliet could read the dictionary & make it interesting. The symbolism and overindulgent wasteland of the characters is more depressing than I remembered. What an in your face cautionary tale. Sort of have a love/hate relationship w the story.

Flaubert is an iconoclast

For those who left a negative review of this literary masterpiece it may be that the content of this story has gone over your heads. This is a realistic “romantic” novel, or one that intentionally shatters the romantic and idealistic traditions, characters, settings, and all manner of plot of the romantic movement in order to expose their essential unreality. For those who cry how this book is mundane, yes. It is mundane. And therein lies its excellence. (Pay attention to these juxtapositions.) It also exposes bare the arrogance and snobbery of a thoroughly conceited, ungrateful, self-absorbed, although brainwashed and misguided, woman who is infatuated with her literary fantasies.

What makes this tale so tragic? It probably is an accurate reflection of the hubris and vanity of the age in which Flaubert lived, honest enough to call the law down on his head.

Stevenson is a superb narrator. Absolutely stellar.

Several parts of this novel are very amusing, especially the interactions between the chemist and the priest.