Madame Bovary

Review "British actor Pickup's semi-voiced reading captures the personalities and moods of the various characters in a masterful manner." -- Kliatt, November 1998<br \><br \>"Cover to Cover's unabridged readings of classic novels are in a class of their own." -- Sunday Telegraph<br \><br \>"Listening to this new, unabridged recording of Madame Bovary, you realize they don't write 'em like that anymore...The novel is read thrillingly by British actor Ronald Pickup, who gives marvelous voice to Flaubert's characters." -- Sunday News, December 1998<br \><br \>"Pickup's exceptional vocal control, attention to nuance, and subtle depictions of a host of diverse characters are brought to bear in the downfall of the self-destructive title character of Bovary. --Booklist, April 15, 1999"Ronald Pickup's delightful reading for Cover to Cover ... strikes just the right chord of unsurprised regret." --Gramophone"These Cover to Cover tapes offer up a delectable feast for fans of the spoken word. We're talking class act here-from the elegant covers to the accomplished readers." --Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY, December 3, 1998 Product Description Why buy our paperbacks?Standard Font size of 10 for all booksHigh Quality PaperFulfilled by AmazonExpedited shipping30 Days Money Back GuaranteeBEWARE of Low-quality sellersDon't buy cheap paperbacks just to save a few dollars. Most of them use low-quality papers & binding. Their pages fall off easily. Some of them even use very small font size of 6 or less to increase their profit margin. It makes their books completely unreadable. How is this book unique?Unabridged (100% Original content)Font adjustments & biography includedIllustratedAbout Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1856) is the French writer Gustave Flaubert's debut novel. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel's true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. Flaubert was a notorious perfectionist and claimed always to be searching for le mot juste ("the precise word"). When the novel was first serialized in La Revue de Paris between 1 October 1856 and 15 December 1856, public prosecutors attacked the novel for obscenity. The resulting trial in January 1857 made the story notorious. After Flaubert's acquittal on 7 February 1857, Madame Bovary became a bestseller in April 1857 when it was published as a single volume. The novel is now considered Flaubert's masterpiece, as well as a seminal work of literary realism and one of the most influential novels. British critic James Wood writes in How Fiction Works: "Flaubert established for good or ill, what most readers think of as modern realist narration and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible". Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From Chris Kraus’s Introduction to Madame BovaryFlaubert has often been credited as being the Father of Realism. Madame Bovary, his first and most classically plot-driven novel, has been labeled as “realist” because of—as many critics would have it—the author’s choice to depict “mediocre” and “vulgar” protagonists circling around a subject as “trite” as adultery. Like much criticism, these readings tell us a great deal more about the critics than the novel. Implicit in such statements are the assumptions (a) that there is anything “trite” about the conflict between human desire and the social demand for monogamy—which, as we will see, was applied selectively in Flaubert’s time to the lower reaches of the French middle class; and (b) that the author himself was immune to the trashy and fickle illusions embraced by his characters. Writing in 1964, critic and novelist Mary McCarthy describes Emma Bovary as “a very ordinary middle-class woman with banal expectations of life and an urge to dominate he