Tuesday, February 8, 2011
The Fullness of Things
Finished Flaubert's masterpiece yesterday and immediately wanted to read it again knowing that I would discover a different novel next time round. The first time I ever read it I remember being stunned by just how much he seemed to take us into the dying Emma's consciousness. This time round it was the idiotic nobility of Charles at the end that skewered me. Next time, who knows what secret places of the heart he will make me weep (metaphorically! - I think) over?
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2 comments:
I haven't yet read the novel, but this reminded me of a section in William Styron's 'Sophie's Choice':
"The novel which he esteemed above all others, he said, was Madame Bovary, not alone because of its formal perfection but because of the resolution of the suicide motif; Emma's death by self-poisoning seeming to be so beautifully inevitable as to become one of the supreme emblems, in Western literature, of the human condition."
Gosh that's good. There is something eerily emblematic about what goes on in those final chapters. That bit about formal perfection is also spot on. Flaubert just seems to get everything so right, down to the weight of each episode. But it's a deeply disturbing kind of inevitability. What a wonderfully dangerous book! Definitely one to keep out of the hands of minors.
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