Not having read any Franzen before, I knew him only because of his infamous Oprah snub, which gave me the impression that he's one of those very self-Not having read any Franzen before, I knew him only because of his infamous Oprah snub, which gave me the impression that he's one of those very self-important dude-lit authors who knows he's writing Serious Literature. For dudes.
Freedom is a well-written and interesting book, convincing me that yeah, the dude can write, and he's no hack. He covers a certain modern milieu and a range of characters in 21st century America, all believable, complex, and highlighting the pathos, comedy, and absurdity in our modern world.
That said, Franzen reminds me of Haruki Murakami, who has a minimum number of penis scenes per book, and this book almost lost me with the scatological phone sex and then more lavishly described scatology with the same character having to "pass" his engagement ring and then retrieve it from the contents thus passed.
I mean, if I read another Franzen book and there is poop in it, I'm going to be convinced he has a fetish.
The real strength of Freedom, however, is Walter and Patty Berglund, two painfully earnest, painfully described affluent SWPL liberals living the American dream with two painfully earnest children. Walter works as an environmental lawyer, and we learn he is on a path to damnation as he gets in bed with a coal mining company to save a tiny patch of forest as a bird preserve, but of course this involves actually selling out all his supposed principles. Intertwined with this are the flirtations of his sexy twenty-something assistant, so yeah, you got it, Franzen is indeed following the dude-lit mold: aging middle-ager at the height of his career but missing a little something-something in the marital bed discovers the magical revitalizing power of a hot younger chick.
Or not. In fairness, Walter really tries to resist Lalitha's (oh you so clever Franzen) advances, because he's a faithful married man.
In fact, Walter's painful devotion to his wife, Patty, a woman who married beta-male Walter because she really wanted his alpha-male best friend, rock star Richard Katz, is the key to the eventual unraveling of everything. When Walter discovers the truth by discovering Patty's unfortunate autobiographical therapeutic journal, he completely comes apart, and while I did not like Walter (or Patty, or really, any character in this book except maybe Lalitha), I winced with him and felt his pain — Franzen makes his unmanning as the scales fall from his eyes visceral. All his life he's been Captain Nice Guy, doing and saying all the right things, and now he's exposed to the bitter Red Pill truth: nice guys finish last, and chicks really do dig jerks.
Which might be a reason why you might not like this novel, because as brilliant and subtle and satirical and knife-twisting as it is, Franzen, with all his liberal sensibilities (which he's not afraid to puncture viciously and repeatedly when they are echoed by his characters) sure doesn't let any of the women come off looking particularly good. Lalitha is sweet and smart and dedicated, but she subsumes all that with her desire to jump her older married boss, like a sort of Indian-American Monica Lewinsky. Patty is, when not cheating on her husband, a self-absorbed politically vapid liberal. She does, like Walter, get a completely rounded personal history (including an episode of date rape in college that forever mars her relationship with her parents), but despite her genuine remorse, it's hard to feel sorry for the emasculating bitch. Of course it's hard to feel sorry for Walter, too — any woman you have to pursue that desperately and from whom you demand that much reassurance is clearly not into you, so he should have known what he was signing up for when he married her.
Then there is Walter's son Joey whose girlfriend basically hitches her entire life to Joey's star (Oh captain her captain) and follows him wherever he may lead. Even though Joey is in many ways as big a schmuck as his dad, his eye-rolling Millenial condescensions notwithstanding.
This book is about a family unraveling, but it's clearly metaphorical for the unraveling of the privileged American Whole Foods generation. There are many levels on which I could analyze this book more deeply, because I'm sure it rewards a deeper reading, but I enjoyed it (and hated parts of it) because Franzen has a Dickens-like talent for telling social fables with memorable characters. However, he also has a Murakami/Roth/Bellow-like talent for writing about dicks, metaphorical and literal, so if you are not inclined to enjoy the preoccupations of entitled dudes with penises and poop, Freedom may not be to your taste.
A definite 4-star read because it's a complex narrative where everything fits together and the words are pretty. Franzen has the gift, even if I still believe (perhaps unjustly, but now weighted by words of his I've actually read) that he's probably kind of a jerk....more
Let me be bold here: I think this book deserves to be a modern classic.
Not because it's the greatest book I've ever read. I liked it a lot, but it falLet me be bold here: I think this book deserves to be a modern classic.
Not because it's the greatest book I've ever read. I liked it a lot, but it falls short of true greatness.
I am, however, comparing it to a lot of other classics I've read in the past few years, and in particular, the great melodramatic social commentaries like Bleak House, Mansfield Park, Middlemarch, North and South, Can You Forgive Her?, The Age of Innocence and so on.
Note that while I liked most of those books, I didn't love them. And I'm not necessarily comparing Héctor Tobar with the likes of Charles Dickens or Jane Austen.
But he does exactly what Dickens and Austen and Trollope and Eliot, et al did — in telling a story about characters caught in a particular time and place in rather contrived situations, he tells us about that milieu. And by telling a good story with vibrant and detailed characters, he makes the story interesting.
The milieu here is 21st century Los Angeles. Like most of the above-mentioned social commentarians, Tobar centers the story in a well-to-do household, that of Scott Torres and Maureen Torres-Thompson.
There's a wealth of details just in their names. Scott is a computer geek paper millionaire working at a start-up. He's all but abandoned the Mexican half of his heritage, including his Mexican father who was banned from his household by his wife for making what she considered to be a racially insensitive remark. Maureen is the very model of a nice progressive white lady who thinks racism and sexism and other isms are just ever so awful, while enjoying her stay-at-home mom status with floors washed, toilets scrubbed, meals cooked, and lawns gardened by underpaid Mexicans.
They both are and are not sympathetic people. Scott and Maureen really are pretty ordinary upper-middle class Californians with major materialistic blindness. Scott is utterly emasculated, Maureen is utterly emasculating, without being deliberately cruel. When she goes out and orders an expensive landscaping job, just as Scott has let go all but one of their Mexican help because the recession has devastated their savings and his company is struggling, it precipitates a conflict that leads to the second half of the novel.
Araceli Ramirez is the Torres-Thompsons' cook/housekeeper. She gets paid $250/week plus room and board. Nannying and babysitting is emphatically not part of her job - she doesn't even like kids. But when a series of ill-timed miscommunications lead Scott and Maureen both to leave the house for several days, each believing that their two boys are with the other one, Araceli is stuck with them.
The specific circumstances that cause Scott and Maureen to be unaware that they left their kids with the housekeeper for four days, and that cause Araceli to decide that she needs to take them across L.A. to their grandfather's house, are a bit contrived, a comedy of errors engineered to be convenient to the plot. But once they get underway, it's an interesting journey, because Araceli is the real main character.
She is not a "heroine." She's not a "spunky protagonist." And she's certainly not a nice motherly Latina guardian angel. She's a serious, responsible, hard-working woman who has learned to live with bitterness and lost opportunities. To her employers, she's just the unsmiling housekeeper they dubbed "Ms. Weirdness." In fact, Araceli is an astute observer of human nature who only refrains from making sharp comments because her English isn't very good. She's a former art student who had to leave her university in Mexico City, and now here she is trying to keep these sensitive, imaginative gringa boys out of trouble.
Their adventure turns into an even more farcical comedy of errors involving the police, politicians, celebrities, political activists and race-baiters, with Araceli caught in a media firestorm.
Is there a profound message in this book? Not really. The Barbarian Nurseries doesn't tell us anything we don't already know. America assimilates, rich people tend to be privileged and entitled, rich liberals tend to think very highly of their never-tested principles, no one actually wants to get rid of illegal immigrants except a few politicized useful fools, and just because someone doesn't speak your language doesn't mean they aren't thinking thoughts.
But it's the situation and the characters that make this book. What did Dickens or Trollope ever tell us that we didn't already know? And no one who appreciates the old classics should criticize Héctor Tobar's occasional tilt towards absurdity.
This novel of modern culture and racial friction in Los Angeles doesn't get 5 stars because it didn't have the literary brilliance to make it one of my faves. I think what it was most missing, for me, was humor. There were times when it was almost a satire, but not quite. But still, definitely a recommended read....more
This is possibly the most annoying book I have ever listened to.
Annete Bening is great as the narrator of this audiobook: she catches the stream-of-coThis is possibly the most annoying book I have ever listened to.
Annete Bening is great as the narrator of this audiobook: she catches the stream-of-consciousness voices of the characters perfectly. The problem is that listening to these voices is exactly like listening to someone's interior monologue as they natter to themselves about every detail they observe going throughout their day.
I haven't read James Joyce's Ulysses, but apparently the writing style in Mrs. Dalloway is often compared to that book. I can't say it makes me eager to tackle Joyce. There isn't really a plot in this book, just character studies. Clarissa Dalloway is a high-society woman planning a party; we follow her throughout her day starting with a walk along Bond Street. She meets an old flame who's just returned from India, prompting reflection about why she married her stodgy, reliable husband Richard Dalloway instead of the more interesting but less stable Peter Walsh. Then the narrative switches to Walsh's point of view, as we follow him going about London, reflecting on Clarissa and her refusal of his marriage proposal and the married woman he's now hooked up with.
The book drifts in and out of viewpoints, shifting perspectives and threads of narrative. Mrs. Dalloway is the main character whose head we get into, but we are also treated to the thoughts of Septimus Warren Smith, a traumatized, suicidal veteran of the Great War, whose Italian wife can't understand why he keeps acting ill when the doctors say nothing is wrong with him.
The prose is elegant and pretty and Woolf is quite artful in the way she gets us thoroughly into the characters' heads, telling us all about their hopes, fears, secrets, and entire life histories in snippets of rambling internal monologue. It's one of those "literary" novels whose craft I can appreciate while making me never want to read it again. I can see why Woolf is studied by graduate students, but nothing here spoke to me or interested me, and listening to Clarissa Dalloway go on and on and on and on, treating every precious thought she has like a precious little diamond, listening to self-involved Peter Walsh go on and on and on about his love lives past and present and his failure to "make a success" of himself, listening to Septimus Smith go on and on and on about his dead friend who haunts him and how detached he is from society, made me feel like someone trapped on a bus between people talking on their cell phones.
A snarkier review of this book could legitimately be hashtagged with #firstworldproblems, aside from Septimus's PTSD, which I'll grant that Woolf treated with a fair degree of nuance and sympathy for the time this was written. There's also a hint of a past lesbian infatuation and a lot of ruminating on the basic dissatisfaction of upper-class married life, which I guess is why this book is supposed to be an early "feminist" work.
It was not to my taste. Virginia Woolf may have been a genius, but I suspect you have to have your head somewhere like where Clarissa's or Septimus's heads are at to love this book. Maybe I'd have found the stream-of-consciousness prose more interesting and less annoying in print....more
Nightwood is one of those literary books where the power is all in the prose, and you read it for the experience. Of plot there is very little, and thNightwood is one of those literary books where the power is all in the prose, and you read it for the experience. Of plot there is very little, and the characters are grotesque sketches. Robin Vote is an American in Paris. She marries a Jew and self-styled "Baron" named Hedvig Folkbein, bears him a sickly child named Guido, and leaves them both abandoned and ruined when she runs off with another woman, Nora Flood. She and Nora enjoy a tumultuous, passionate and dissipated affair before Robin runs off to New York with yet another woman, Jenny Petherbridge, leaving Nora also heartbroken and destroyed. Even the relationship between Robin and Jenny does not end well.
This novel, written in 1936, is quite explicit about lesbian relationships. (By "explicit" I don't mean sexually — I mean there are no euphemisms or metaphors, it's right out in the open that these are chicks hooking up.) If you're eager for early 20th century LGBT lit, though, don't wade into Nightwood expecting a lesbian romance. Barnes' view of lesbians is hardly positive: "A man is another person — a woman is yourself." And considering that all these lesbians wind up broken and miserable, feelgood it is not.
Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the "findings" in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body, the raiment, the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover will be traced, as indelible shadow, that which he loves. In Nora's heart lay the fossil of Robin, intaglio of her identity, and about it for its maintenance ran Nora's blood. Thus the body of Nora could never be unloved, corrupt or put away. Robin was now beyond timely changes, except in the blood that animated her. That she could be spilled of this fixed the walking image of Robin in appalling apprehension on Nora's mind — Robin alone, crossing streets, in danger. Her mind became so transfixed that by the agency of her fear, Robin seemed enormous and polarized, all catastrophes ran toward her, the magnetized predicament; and crying out, Nora would wake from sleep, going back through the tide of dreams into which her anxiety had thrown her, taking the body of Robin down with her into it, as the ground things take the corpse, with minute persistence, down into the earth, leaving a pattern of it on the grass, as if they stitched as they descended.
Barnes' poetic style is the featured attraction, and that you have to experience. T.S. Eliot in the foreword says "only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it," and that's probably true, because I didn't appreciate it so much as endure it. Jeanette Winterson says: "Nightwood is itself. It is its own created world, exotic and strange, and reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work. From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined."
Well, I don't know about that either. But there were passages of pure genius and imagery. I particularly like the introduction of Jenny Petherbridge:
She had a beaked head and the body, small, feeble, and ferocious, that somehow made one associate her with Judy; they did not go together. Only severed could any part of her have been called "right." There was a trembling ardour in her wrists and fingers as if she were suffering from some elaborate denial. She looked old, yet expectant of age; she seemed to be steaming in the vapours of someone else about to die; still she gave off an odour to the mind (for there are purely mental smells that have no reality) of a woman about to be accouchée. Her body suffered from its fare, laughter and crumbs, abuse and indulgence. But put out a hand to touch her, and her head moved perceptibly with the broken arc of two instincts, recoil and advance, so that the head rocked timidly and aggressively at the same moment, giving her a slightly shuddering and expectant rhythm.
She writhed under the necessity of being unable to wear anything becoming, being one of those panicky little women who, no matter what they put on, look like a child under penance.
Barnes was a genius and a poet. But the prose is dense and unstopping and sometimes paragraphs take two or three reads and my eyes would not come unglazed. I am not one of those people T.S. Eliot described, with "sensibilities trained on poetry." Nightwood was not an easy read, and to be quite honest, I forced myself through it because it's pretty short, at only 200 pages. If it had been a longer book, I probably would have bailed at 50 pages and said "I can't take any more of this." It's all dark and brooding wailing and gnashing of teeth. Worst of all are the monologues by Dr. O'Connor, a dissolute gynecologist who likes to wear women's clothing.
"Have you," said the doctor, "ever thought of the peculiar polarity of times and times; and of sleep? Sleep the slain white bull? Well, I, Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Connor, will tell you how the day and the night are related by their division. The very constitution of twilight is a fabulous reconstruction of fear, fear bottom-out and wrong side up. Every day is thought upon and calculated, but the night is not premeditated. The Bible lies one way, but the night-gown the other. The night, "Beware of that dark door!"
"I used to think," Nora said, "that people just went to sleep, or if they did not go to sleep that they were themselves, but now" — she lit a cigarette and her hands trembled — "now I see that the night does something to a person's identity, even when they sleep."
"Ah!" exclaimed the doctor. "Let a man lay himself down in the Great Bed and his 'identity' is no longer his own, his 'trust' is not with him, and his 'willingness' is turned over and is of another permission. His distress is wild and anonymous. He sleeps in a Town of Darkness, member of the secret brotherhood. He neither knows himself nor his outriders; he berserks a fearful dimension and dismounts, miraculously, in bed!"
He goes on like that for pages. It's like modernist performance art, two characters barking poetically at the moon. This was one of those books where I could stare at the prose and realize yes, this author does things with words that are as far beyond my abilities as Tiger Woods is beyond my ability to play golf, and yet... oh gads, Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Connor, shut up. Also, all these people suck.
I didn't really enjoy this book, though I could appreciate the incredible talent and mad genius of Djuna Barnes. But any book this short that was still such a struggle to get through that I was relieved when it was finished, I can't give more than 2 stars.
I've come to a realization: Charles Dickens is not my favorite Victorian. I'm 50/50 on Anthony Trollope so far, and this was only my first George ElioI've come to a realization: Charles Dickens is not my favorite Victorian. I'm 50/50 on Anthony Trollope so far, and this was only my first George Eliot, but the two of them are just so much better than Dickens when it comes to describing fully-realized human beings of both sexes. Not that Dickens isn't good at what he does, which is comic, poignant melodrama with a social edge, but his characters are just not real. Not like the inhabitants of Middlemarch.
On the other hand, there was none of Dickens' epic scope in Middlemarch. This is an English country drama, all centered around the town of Middlemarch. There are no high stakes or ultimate questions of human morality, just a bunch of characters struggling to get by and navigate the consequences of their ideals, their pasts, their prejudices, and their bad choices.
Our cast includes Dorothea Brooke, an idealistic, pious young lady who was born to be a sainted martyr. Full of charity and self-sacrifice, she manages to find a way to martyr herself — by marrying a dour, much older clergyman named Edward Casaubon. She dreams of devoting herself to his studies, being the selfless angel at his side.
"Could I not be preparing myself now to be more useful?" said Dorothea to him, one morning, early in the time of courtship; "could I not learn to read Latin and Greek aloud to you, as Milton's daughters did to their father, without understanding what they read?"
She practically throws herself at the bemused Casaubon, not because she feels anything like romantic passion, but because living a life of the mind devoted to waiting on her husband's every need seems like the closest thing to Godliness to her. You might think this makes Dorothea an aggravating character, yet Eliot portrays her as honest, willful, altruistic, and intelligent, her only flaw being that she lives in a world that's missing a few of the shades and colors that everyone else can see.
Meanwhile, a bright young surgeon named Tertius Lydgate comes to Middlemarch, full of the latest medical knowledge. Unfortunately, Middlemarchers are a hidebound lot with their own way of doing things and they don't need no "foreign" (i.e., anyone from any place more than ten miles away) physicians coming here with their newfangled ways. Lydgate makes a few friends, but he also steps on a few toes and soon is enmeshed in the politics of an English country town whether he likes it or not. Is it this or his marriage to Rosamund Vincy which is his real downfall? Eliot lays the groundwork for this good man to screw himself over in a multitude of ways while never really doing anything wrong other than being a bit lacking in foresight.
But once again, she creates complex characters who could just be caricatures (and if written by Dickens, would be) yet manage to come to life as people you can sympathize with. Rosamund, for example, is shallow, self-centered, and materialistic. She pretty much manipulates Lydgate into proposing to her, and from then on the poor man is trapped. When his career doesn't take off, their finances go south, and Rosamund experiences buyer's remorse, I really, really felt sorry for Lydgate. But amazingly enough, even though Rosamund made me gnash my teeth, I didn't hate her. Because Eliot takes pains to make her understandable.
But Rosamond was not one of those helpless girls who betray themselves unawares, and whose behavior is awkwardly driven by their impulses, instead of being steered by wary grace and propriety. Do you imagine that her rapid forecast and rumination concerning house-furniture and society were ever discernible in her conversation, even with her mamma? On the contrary, she would have expressed the prettiest surprise and disapprobation if she had heard that another young lady had been detected in that immodest prematureness—indeed, would probably have disbelieved in its possibility. For Rosamond never showed any unbecoming knowledge, and was always that combination of correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing, private album for extracted verse, and perfect blond loveliness, which made the irresistible woman for the doomed man of that date. Think no unfair evil of her, pray: she had no wicked plots, nothing sordid or mercenary; in fact, she never thought of money except as something necessary which other people would always provide. She was not in the habit of devising falsehoods, and if her statements were no direct clew to fact, why, they were not intended in that light—they were among her elegant accomplishments, intended to please. Nature had inspired many arts in finishing Mrs. Lemon's favorite pupil, who by general consent (Fred's excepted) was a rare compound of beauty, cleverness, and amiability.
She's not mercenary, she's not mean, she's not evil. She's just making the best bargain she can, with a realistic assessment of her own worth, given the options available to a Victorian woman of her class. Love, like money, is something that's just supposed to happen when you follow the rules.
This thirty-two-hour audiobook got me involved in the lives of the Brookes and the Vincys and the Garths and the Bulstrodes and the Casaubons and all the other families of Middlemarch. It's a great big multi-family melodrama, with marriages and deaths and money scandals, and each character impacts all the others in some way. There is no villain here and nobody is really evil, though some characters are selfish or foolish or obnoxious, so all the conflict results from mundane things - bad marriages, jealousy, misunderstandings, fecklessness, and other human foibles.
It's something of a Victorian soap opera, but an elegant and intricate one. If you like Victorian writing and character dramas, Middlemarch is a masterpiece. Maybe it doesn't have quite the profundity of Dostoevsky or the poignancy of Dickens, but will I read George Eliot again? Heck yeah! 4.5 stars, rounded up....more
A+ for mood and a suspenseful plot; B- for the most self-centered, melodramatic characters written since the Brontës' time. Great but laborious descriA+ for mood and a suspenseful plot; B- for the most self-centered, melodramatic characters written since the Brontës' time. Great but laborious descriptive details, and an abrupt and cliched ending.
I can see why this creepy mystery is a classic: it combines the gothic atmosphere of Jane Eyre with the suspense of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. The young bride of Maxim de Winter is brought back to his English estate, Manderley, after a whirlwind courtship, and finds the shadow of his first wife, Rebecca, lingering over everything. Young, insecure, unsure of herself, she is easily cowed by the domineering housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, who resents the woman usurping her mistress's place.
The mystery of Rebecca is nicely maintained throughout the book. Who was she, what kind of a woman was she, and how did she die? Even when the big revelations come, the story isn't over, as there are several more plot twists skillfully spun out right up to the end.
This would have been a solidly 4-star book for me except there were two things that made me enjoy it less. The first is the protagonist, who's basically a timid ingenue with barely any will of her own. She's completely dominated first by her employer, then by her older husband, and then by her catty, vindictive housekeeper Mrs. Danvers. She spends most of her time tormenting herself with what she imagines everyone else is thinking about her, and when she finally starts taking a tiny bit of initiative, she's still completely self-involved. As for Max de Winter, well, du Maurier is writing in the grand old Brontë tradition of creepy, abusive control freaks being portrayed as romantic.
The second thing I didn't enjoy was the long, tedious descriptions of everything: Manderley, the cliffs, the furniture, the flowers and vases, the clothes, the meals, etc. A little descriptive detail is great; a little more can be described as "lush"; Rebecca is just plain wordy. Along with the narrator's long, tedious internal monologues, this book really seemed to drag in places. I was eager to get to the climax and the unveiling of all secrets, and relieved once it was over.
I give it 3.5 stars, which right now I'm rounding to 3 though maybe I will feel more generous later....more
Of all the books I had to read in high school, this is the only one I truly hated. Probably the most boring book I ever forced myself to finish. None Of all the books I had to read in high school, this is the only one I truly hated. Probably the most boring book I ever forced myself to finish. None of the characters are likeable, the story is tedious, and I think it only still gets assigned in English classes because it was "controversial" a hundred and fifty years ago.
November, 2012 reread
Okay, I get it now.
Previously, I gave Madame Bovary 1 star, because among all the books I had to read in high school, that was the only one I remembered absolutely hating (though The Mayor of Casterbridge was pretty close). But that was many, many years ago, and since lately I've been reading or rereading a lot of classics, I kept looking at that 1 star and thinking, "Well, it couldn't really have been that bad, could it?"
So, I girded my literary loins and gave Madame Bovary another spin. And it wasn't that bad. Though it wasn't that good either, hence I have upgraded it to a respectable if not impressive 3 stars. Flaubert may or may not be a great stylist, as I've found that French literature translated into English depends as much on the skill of the translator as that of the writer. But he does have a fine grasp of details, all the details of a hum-drum middle-class life in 19th century France. And he has a fine grasp of characterization -- all his hum-drum middle-class characters in their banal, day-to-day existence.
And that's the point. Madame Bovary is famous for being a novel about adultery, and for getting the author charged with obscenity. But there's absolutely nothing titillating or even exciting in this book. Flaubert is writing about disappointment, about mediocrity, about the banality of the bourgeoisie. This is the ultimate anti-romance, which is why it's so renowned as a work of Realism.
Emma Bovary cheats on her husband because she's bored and disappointed. She grew up with romantic fantasies, and finds herself married to an unambitious country doctor of little talent. Charles Bovary absolutely loves, adores his wife. No matter how badly she mistreats him, he just keeps doting on her. He never blames her for anything. He's kind, faithful, reliable, a good provider, peaceful, never has a harsh word... what many women would consider the ideal husband. And he's dull as a brick. Emma ends up falling first for a young law student, and later a caddish landowner, because she is hoping for an escape from the tedium of married life. Instead, her affairs turn equally tedious, with all the added misery of furtiveness and fear of scandal.
Flaubert was charged with obscenity because the book does not explicitly condemn Emma for her infidelity and supposedly it glamorized adultery. How anyone could read this book, even in the 19th century, and think it's glamorizing anything, I can't imagine. Emma Bovary's life is nothing but misery and disappointment. She's not very likable -- she's a terrible wife and mother -- but one can't help feeling sorry for her. Charles Bovary is a nice man, but about as interesting as mud, and one feels sorry for him too, but you can almost excuse Emma for cheating on him. Which is maybe what made this book so scandalously "obscene."
Anyway, as a teenager reading this book, of course I didn't relate to it at all. How can a teenager empathize with the inner life of a bored bourgeoisie housewife? How could I have identified with the monotony of an outwardly successful but utterly, unhappily one-sided marriage? Madame Bovary is all about how romanticism cannot flourish in a world of mundane realism. And it's about a bad marriage and how the middle class is boring and stupid. What teenager wants to read about that, let alone is going to grasp its meaning? I think foisting this off on teenagers does them a disservice. Sure, not all books read in high school should necessarily be "fun," and Madame Bovary is notable for its historical importance and for being a benchmark of the Realist movement in literature, but I still think it's just a horrible book to stick high school students with. Let them wait until college to read about how boring marriage and middle class life is....more
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