Madame Bovary
Penguin Classics · first published 1857 · 384 pages
A doctor's wife in a Normandy town, bored by provincial life, chases the romance she has read about in novels.
Each scene is built from exact, ordinary detail, and the irony is so quiet it can be easy to miss.
For a night when the town feels too small.
About this book
Emma grows up on a farm reading romantic novels and marries Charles Bovary, a decent but dull country doctor. Life in their small town resembles nothing in her books, and she looks for it elsewhere: in finery, in a young clerk's admiration, in an affair with a landowner. Debts gather quietly in the background. Lydia Davis's translation keeps close to the precision and rhythm of the French.