Madame Bovary

This book is a two-star book in the Goodreads scale: "it was ok". There is no aesthetic judgement. W.H. Auden gives us all the perspective we need on this.

For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it.

Madame Bovary is very definitely class two: I can see this is good but I don't like it. I mean, maybe I can see that it's great, but I don't like it. In fact, I bet it's spectacular in the original French. But...

I can't figure out if Flaubert hates Emma Bovary in specific, or women in general. Or maybe he hates the sexist society that led Emma to be blown like a leaf on the wind from minor disaffection to minor disaffection, and because of the translation, or perhaps because I'd been bored to death by another tedious description of a masquerade ball, I missed it. Or considering that he was prone to commenting that "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" ("[she] is me", literally translated), and the text seems to openly despise her, I'm merely looking at the manifest self-loathing of one of the world's great depressives.

If I had to guess, though, I'd say it's the style. The books has a fanatical devotion to realism, incredible attention to detail and description, a total lack of digression, and a fundamental objectivity. And maybe that's why I worry that I've lost something in the translation -- even in its original Klingon French -- is that the style just doesn't sound right to my inner era.

And that's the final feeling I have there: he's clearly doing what he wants to, in the way he wants to, and doing it very well. I either don't really care for what he's doing, or I don't really care about how he's doing it, and so I put the book down and only WH Auden can console me.