Used book – Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

Preface, notes, and supplementary materials by Jacques Neefs. A romantic young woman, who had constructed a romantically dreamed-up world for herself, attempts to escape – in an increasing daze – the boredom of her provincial life, the mediocrity of her marriage, and the flatness of her existence. But when Flaubert published Madame Bovary in 1857, the entire novelty of the novel lay in the contrast between such a highly accomplished art and the depiction of such an ordinary world. The writing transfigures life, yet adapts to it so closely that it brings it to life before our eyes.

“It was no longer a novel as the greatest writers had made them,” Maupassant would say: “It was life itself appearing. One would have said that the characters rose before one's eyes as the pages turned, that the landscapes unfolded with their sorrows and their joys, their smells, their charm, that the objects also emerged before the reader as an invisible power, hidden one knows not where, evoked them.”