Not an easy book to rate on a five-star scale.
Critics describe Madame Bovary as a perfect book, in the most specific sense: It is absolutely watertight and concrete. Every sentence is a Chekhov’s gun. Every small detail hums with significance. Somehow, this relentless symmetry adds up to a merciless, photorealistic clarity, which is odd when you think about it; real life isn’t this watertight. But Flaubert gives the impression of having seen and dissected one woman’s entire life and made sense of it, like a detective taking snapshots of a crime scene.
With this in mind, it’s fair to describe the novel as an astonishing technical achievement.
But exactly because Madame Bovary is a masterpiece of realism, it’s dreadfully depressing to read. Flaubert is convincing. He paints in minute detail an absolutely bleak world, a series of self-deceiving people bound together by relations of lust, greed, and boredom. And what’s hard is that this world looks so much like our world. It’s very, very plausible, and he’s detailed every dewdrop on every blade of grass.
I think, though I’m not sure, that within the world of the novel Madame Bovary’s self-destruction is inevitable. There seems to be nothing, and nobody, who could have formed her into a person who could love meaningfully or selflessly. Nobody in her world has that kind of character, and none of the communities she lives in produce anyone like that. I say that I’m not sure. I can imagine a reading of the novel where Charles could be noble, Tostes and Yonville could be redeemable, where Emma’s fate could be different.
To sum up: I hope Emma and everyone around her is wrong. I hope that when you pay attention to the world, see every flower on every oat-stalk and every bumbling country doctor, you find that you can look them into loveliness. I hope that even being bound to a dull community of foolish people could bring unexpected graces. I hope that reality has a richer romance than fantasy.
