I am getting the picture that this movie may be a better version of its book than audiences in 1949 had any right to expect.
I was certainly surprised, reading your account, to recognise key scene after key scene. I wasn't expecting the agricultural fair...
Do you recommend the book itself?
It's a literary classic; who am I to recommend or not recommend? I have what I'm pretty sure is a skewed reading of it: I'm partisan for Charles Bovary, who seems to me to be the romantic hero of the piece. There's something of the cargo cult about Emma's romanticism - she looks for romantic love in appropriate settings, that Scottish cottage or Alpine idyll, it's all about the externals (I don't think this is misogyny on Flaubert's part, he claimed that the character was drawn from himself, Madame Bovary, c'est moi, though you could certainly blame her education) whereas Charles is desperately in love with his wife. She hopes the right trappings will create the feelings, whereas at the very end of the book his feelings send him towards the sort of romantic trappings she loved. Which I find touching, though it's typical of Flaubert's dark humour.
I find it an easier read than Salammbô - but we are different readers!
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I was certainly surprised, reading your account, to recognise key scene after key scene. I wasn't expecting the agricultural fair...
Do you recommend the book itself?
It's a literary classic; who am I to recommend or not recommend? I have what I'm pretty sure is a skewed reading of it: I'm partisan for Charles Bovary, who seems to me to be the romantic hero of the piece. There's something of the cargo cult about Emma's romanticism - she looks for romantic love in appropriate settings, that Scottish cottage or Alpine idyll, it's all about the externals (I don't think this is misogyny on Flaubert's part, he claimed that the character was drawn from himself, Madame Bovary, c'est moi, though you could certainly blame her education) whereas Charles is desperately in love with his wife. She hopes the right trappings will create the feelings, whereas at the very end of the book his feelings send him towards the sort of romantic trappings she loved. Which I find touching, though it's typical of Flaubert's dark humour.
I find it an easier read than Salammbô - but we are different readers!