[ book tip by Translated Tips ] Selyem Zsuzsa writes about the Hungarian edition of Bovaryné
This novel manages to trouble me in a different way every time I read it. Obviously, it is able to touch a raw nerve somewhere. When I first read it I was only interested in Madame Bovary's life. I was only interested in her, and everything else was just a mere background, an obstacle hindering Emma's wonderful ideas. Plainly, I first read it at a time one first falls in love (back in ancient times, before Flaubert), and I took each meaningful sign as being meant for me. The second reading added only one further unforgettable experience to the already existing one: when Lestiboudois, the church-attendant, who grows potatoes in the cemetery recognizes Justin, while kneeling at Emma's grave, as being the one who has been stealing his potatoes.

With the third reading, I was able to notice a few of the protagonists, like Mr. Homais with his deceitful righteousness; Emma's lovers like Rodolphe, the dumber than average Léon, the lovingly selfish father, the detestably greedy mother-in-law, the artificiality of the priest with his clumsy behaviour, and I gradually came to see Madame Bovary's inner constraints. Cowardly, lying and egotistical; in this I also recognized myself.

But I never learnt from them. With the passing of time I came to recognize deceit and how people play this out against each other and against themselves in the name of generosity. Through the fine balancing of Flaubert's sentences, however, we must not fall under the delusion that we can avoid such deceit; and the movement within the work forces us to realize that we must not think of trying to grasp the truth, in fact it does not even end there with the possibility of eluding deception.

[ book info ] Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary. Dover Thrift Editions, 1997 . ISBN: 0486292576.