Recently I got into a discussion about which books I should have read and Madame Bovary featured high on the list (and it's a lot shorter than Remembrance of Things Past) so I bumped it to the top of my ever expanding pile of books. Books that threaten to overwhelm me with their demands, their insidious paper fingers, their words like confetti silently falling around me as I fall too! The dangers of fiction. And then the dangers of having to write about it. What can be left to say about Madame Bovary that hasn't been said a thousand times before.
Madame Bovary seems to me to be, like Don Quixote, a warning on the dangers of books. They only give birth to illusions, all of which, in the eye of Flaubert, shall be dulled by life. "Before the wedding, she had believed herself in love. But not having obtained the happiness that should have resulted from that love, she now fancied that she must have been mistaken. And Emma wondered exactly what was meant in life by the words 'bliss', 'passion', 'ecstasy', which had looked so beautiful in books."
