Emma Rouault marries Charles Bovary, a kind but dull country doctor, expecting the romance she read about in novels. Life in the Norman town of Yonville disappoints her, so she looks to affairs with the landowner Rodolphe and the clerk Léon, and spends heavily on luxuries bought on credit from the merchant Lheureux. Debts close in, the lovers abandon her, and she takes arsenic. Flaubert's calm, exact prose, and the pharmacist Homais as a figure of smug progress, made the book a landmark of realism.
Readers fond of nineteenth-century novels, or interested in how fantasy collides with ordinary life, will find a precise, sad study. It also stands up as a story of consumer debt.
Deep, inward-looking and thought-provoking; a moderate read.
Best for readers like The Wisdom Collector. Which reader are you?
- Published
- 2009
- Publisher
- Adevărul Holding
- ISBN
- 9789731999395
- Language
- RO
