I was certainly surprised, reading your account, to recognise key scene after key scene. I wasn't expecting the agricultural fair...
I really think that's wonderful. I'm more used to classic Hollywood adaptations being in the Christmas with the Manettes line.
It's a literary classic; who am I to recommend or not recommend?
Someone whose tastes I generally trust?
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 think you would like Van Heflin's Charles. I don't know if he's Flaubert's, but I believe him and I find him both sympathetic and painful. When Emma wishes that he were "worthless and dashing and brutal," she's describing her real husband in antithesis—hardworking and socially graceless and, indeed, desperately in love with his wife and forlornly aware that every time he reaffirms his feelings for her, it only worsens her disenchantment with him. He doesn't know why and he can't do otherwise; it isn't in him to stage a jealous scene like she describes, even though it might reawaken her impression of him as her kind of hero. He has one great moment of insight when he insists on taking a listless Emma to the opera at Rouen, correctly guessing she'll find it exciting, dramatic, transporting. (He himself is a washout on the art form, ruefully claiming that he'd really enjoy it "if it weren't for the music.") Otherwise the best he can do is keep on being himself and hope that someday it makes her happy again. In another kind of story, he would be the hero, the decent, quiet, unshowy but devoted type to whom the heroine turns after being disappointed or wounded by flashier prospects. Instead he's the husband of Madame Bovary, so he's pretty much doomed.
I find it an easier read than SalammbĂ´ - but we are different readers!
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I really think that's wonderful. I'm more used to classic Hollywood adaptations being in the Christmas with the Manettes line.
It's a literary classic; who am I to recommend or not recommend?
Someone whose tastes I generally trust?
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 think you would like Van Heflin's Charles. I don't know if he's Flaubert's, but I believe him and I find him both sympathetic and painful. When Emma wishes that he were "worthless and dashing and brutal," she's describing her real husband in antithesis—hardworking and socially graceless and, indeed, desperately in love with his wife and forlornly aware that every time he reaffirms his feelings for her, it only worsens her disenchantment with him. He doesn't know why and he can't do otherwise; it isn't in him to stage a jealous scene like she describes, even though it might reawaken her impression of him as her kind of hero. He has one great moment of insight when he insists on taking a listless Emma to the opera at Rouen, correctly guessing she'll find it exciting, dramatic, transporting. (He himself is a washout on the art form, ruefully claiming that he'd really enjoy it "if it weren't for the music.") Otherwise the best he can do is keep on being himself and hope that someday it makes her happy again. In another kind of story, he would be the hero, the decent, quiet, unshowy but devoted type to whom the heroine turns after being disappointed or wounded by flashier prospects. Instead he's the husband of Madame Bovary, so he's pretty much doomed.
I find it an easier read than SalammbĂ´ - but we are different readers!
These things happen!