Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary
Novel in which a woman defies the standards of conventional French society.
Customer Review: Madame Bovary-the Mauldon translation
Move over Steegmuller, move over Lowell Bair, Margaret Mauldon's translation is fantastic. The translation flows with elegant ease. This translation has proved better and more accurate than any other, as far as I can tell. I highly recommend this translation.
Customer Review: You Play, You Pay
Honestly, this book is a bitter pill to swallow. It's written beautifully and was a real ground breaker for the realist movement, but the subject matter is incredibly tragic. I found it hard to keep reading as Emma continuously dug herself deeper into trouble, dragging her innocent, loving, and devoted family down with her. It is an incredible moral lesson that is still relevant today: "The Grass is Never Greener on the Other Side." Naturally, I found Emma incredibly dislikeable because she was lazy, melodramatic, arrogant, ignorant, and had this air of entitlement that made me want to slap her. But I did feel sorry for her because she was so caught up in this sense of romanticism, she couldn't see straight. Because of her obsession with passion, the choices she made seemed so predictable, and all you could do was watch it happen like a train wreck in slow motion. I loved how Flaubert mixed the mundane with the romantic in his writing. And I loved the bitter ironies he used, too (especially at the end of the story). I think the reader can gain alot from reading this book to this day. It's unapologetic, yet beautiful.