I read this, along with The Ogre, before a trip to France. I ended up going to Rouen, where Flaubert is from, so I’d like to think that Madame Bovary was a good choice for a pre-trip read. I also think there’s something to Flaubert, in addition to Baudelaire and Rimbaud, that makes up the rowdy French author aesthetic. I also think that I’m likely over generalizing here, but that can’t stop me from making these connections constantly, and I would guess that Flaubert is required reading for all the good French authors, so there’s likely more than a hint of truth to this. But, putting aside meta-conversations, Madame Bovary is a great book. It’s perhaps a little sterile for my tastes. Flaubert does a good job at making this the most novelly novel ever written. I mean in this that it is a story that is meant to be put to these pages in beautiful language and give the reader exactly what they might expect: something that’s not quite expected. Beyond that it’s hard to say what it is. You could look at Flaubert’s own life for insights as to the meaning behind some of these things, and you will very quickly find parallels, connections, and overt biographical references, but Flaubert is an individual who lived his life with close scrutiny, scrutiny beyond that found on wikipedia, and he’s left Madame Bovary fairly sterile of any sort of meaning beyond this novel being just really novelly. At first, I felt that maybe there was something evil about this, perhaps in the same way that Baudelaire is constantly giving the reader grotesque images which are supposed to be upsetting or prove something about how morally bankrupt things can be. But here, with Flaubert, I don’t see that. Sure the characters in the story are something degenerate, but that’s what novels sometimes have. It’s been argued well that shock value makes up a fair portion of what we think of as good in a novel. Even from a very basic level, what is drama if not shock, and who is Flaubert if not the king of shocking the reader. However, I should stop, because Flaubert is much more than shock, and Madame Bovary as a novel isn’t some monster movie. It is first and foremost an ornate display of the beautiful. If the story on these pages might be translated to some other medium, it might be best given a place on the edges of a blue and white chinese porcelain set. The story almost has a classical quality in its austerity. And maybe this is a book of contradictions, a book that has almost a metaphysical, Giorgio de Chirico-esk veneer, but is still a physical object that you can start, stop, and finish. Similarly, in contrast to the austerity and tightness of the novel, the novel also is constantly talking with the reader, putting the reader in the shoes of the Mm. Bovary character, who feverishly reads books and who’s psyche is damaged by false expectations up until the very end where a supposedly quick and painless suicide is turned grewsome. But, once again, Flaubert stops us only to ask did he really mean anything by this? Anyway, he was just making the novelliest novel. Please, reader, drop your pretensions.