Audiobook · read by volunteers
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
Read by hefyd, Ruth Golding, Bob Sage, Elizabeth Klett, icyjumbo (1964-2010), Gloria Zbilicki, Lady Maria, Roz Romero, Merne Túrante, Aaron Elliott · 35 chapters · 12 h 59
About the book
Emma Bovary is a young woman raised on romantic novels, who marries a kind but unremarkable country doctor and finds provincial life unbearably empty. She dreams of passion, luxury and elsewhere, and she tries to find them in love affairs and in spending money she does not have. Gustave Flaubert follows her with pitiless precision and a strange tenderness, from the farm to the small town of Yonville and its ordinary inhabitants. The plot is simple, but the art lies in every detail: the gestures, the objects, the rhythm of sentences chosen with extreme care. This recording uses the English translation by Eleanor Marx Aveling and is shared among a team of LibriVox volunteers. It is the story of an illusion and its cost, told with an unflinching eye. It remains one of the great novels of the nineteenth century.
Introduction
Gustave Flaubert, who lived from 1821 to 1880, spent about five years writing Madame Bovary. It was serialised in the Revue de Paris in 1856 and appeared in book form in April 1857. Flaubert was tried for offending public morals but acquitted in early 1857, and the notoriety helped to make the novel famous. Today it is regarded as a founding work of modern fiction, admired for its precision of style and for the attention it pays to ordinary life.
Although the plot is rather simple, almost archetypal, the true art of the novel lies in its details and in its patterns. Flaubert looks at provincial society with a cold eye, and yet he never allows his heroine to become merely a figure of ridicule. The book shows, with great economy, how the images offered by books and by fashion can shape a person’s hopes, and how reality fails to respond. It has been translated many times, and it continues to influence novelists.
The version used for this recording is the English translation by Eleanor Marx Aveling, the daughter of Karl Marx, first published in 1886. The reading has 35 chapters, grouped into three parts, and runs for about thirteen hours. A team of LibriVox volunteers read it together. For anyone who has never read Madame Bovary, the audio form offers a fine way to take in Flaubert’s rhythms, which were written to be heard. The novel’s shape is clear and its chapters are of manageable size, which makes it suitable for listening in sessions of an hour or so. Hearing the many voices is also a way to appreciate how the narration shifts between the mind of Emma and the view of the town.
Public domain
Gustave Flaubert died in 1880: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text