Reviewer rating: Rating: 3 out of 5 stars ★★★ When Gustave Flaubert's first novel came out in 1856, there was a very French reaction – they put the language of the book on trial. The ostensible charge was obscenity, but the trial went much deeper. The prosecutor argued that the novel's realism was itself immoral: an offence against art. Flaubert was acquitted but they were dead right about his aims. Madame Bovary was a bomb thrown at romanticism. Emma Bovary's troubles begin with her inflated ideas of life, which come from reading romance novels. She is infected with a desire for what we might now call "bracket creep", wanting a metropolitan life of...
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