Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Author: Gustave Flaubert
Original title: Madame Bovary
Pages: 338
Edition Language: Russian
Series: no
Format: e-book
Genres: classics
Goodreads

Blurb:    
   Madame Bovary tells the story of farmgirl Emma, who marries provincial doctor, Charles Bovary, and almost immediately regrets it when she realises that it means she has to live in the provinces.

  My thoughts: 
    Finally, I finished madam Bovary. It was one of my must read classics list. I am not sure what I was expecting, another Gaskell or Austen probably, so I was totally unprepared for what I got into. Such irritating, and unpleasant main character. I was angry with her almost all of the time.
No one can deny the beauty of prose and description. The writing style captures straight away and I could only amaze with what ease and skill the author describes the nature and striving of one's soul.
As for the story, it is a good one, that depicts triviality of provincial life. The main character lives beyond her means in order to escape the trap of her marriage and is looking desperately for happiness. This driving throws her from one desperate and stupid decision to another.
 I was still sick and tired with the main character. I had no patience to all the whining and sighing. I could find no compassion for her, as her behavior, her superiority thinking, her total absence of respect to the only person who truly loved her, made me only more and more irritated.
 I must confess, that I believe, that if I would have read this novel 10 years ago, I might deeply sympathize with madam Bovary, with her unhappiness and romantic wishes. However, now from all the life experience I have no tolerance with her. A person, who failed as a wife and as a mother, in search of something that she deserves, purely based on vanity and a couple romantic books. And her stupid, selfish and dishonorable way of resolving her problems, leaving her family in the mess she created... Not my hero. I took the star from my rating purely based on my disliking of madam Bovary, which does not make a book less worth reading.

Rating:  

    4/5