Madame Bovary
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Madame Bovary
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Narrated by:
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Julie Christie
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By:
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Gustave Flaubert
About this listen
The refusal to settle for what life has dealt you and the consequences of trying to change it is a theme which hasn't altered much in the last 150 years, and the astonishing beauty and challenge of Madame Bovary is as electric today as it was then.
Very few books have created this much outrage and adoration. The sympathetic treatment of Emma Bovary's attempts to escape the maddening boredom of being married to the wrong man, in the wrong town, with the wrong picture of her life via a series of very realistically described adulterous affairs, ensured that Gustave Flaubert had practically the whole of France involved in the hullabaloo that greeted the novel's publication in 1856.
He was prosecuted for it (unsuccessfully) and then wildly fêted for it, and his establishment as one of the most popular of literary geniuses is based on it. This book, in its famous translation by Eleanor Aveling - Karl Marx's daughter - carries a warning: Madame Bovary may cause excessive emotion and great disturbance to your life.
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Emma Bovary is not content to be the mere dutiful wife of a French country doctor. She yearns for excitement and a sense of romance that pulls at her so strongly she is powerless to resist, even though pursuing her dreams will exact a terrible price. Learn why Gustave Flaubert's compelling heroine has enchanted and puzzled readers for centuries.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 34
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 28
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Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment, and the consequences are devastating. Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857.
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4 out of 5 stars
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- By Amazon Customer on 10-02-20
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- Length: 14 hrs and 14 mins
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 651
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 579
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Story4 out of 5 stars 574
In Madame Bovary, one of the great novels of 19th-century France, Flaubert draws a deeply felt and sympathetic portrait of a woman who, having married a country doctor and found herself unhappy with a rural, genteel existence, longs for love and excitement. However, her aspirations and her desires to escape only bring her further disappointment and eventually lead to unexpected, painful consequences. Flaubert’s critical portrait of bourgeois provincial life remains as powerful as ever
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4 out of 5 stars
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Excellent narrator, beautiful writing
- By DHW on 06-11-14
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 6
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 4
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 4
Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, Emma is not content to be the mere dutiful wife of a French country doctor. She believes she was meant for something more—a life of luxury, leisure, and, above all, true and passionate love. She spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and throws herself headlong into a reckless series of doomed affairs. Soon heartbroken and crippled by debts, she takes drastic action, with tragic consequences for her husband and daughter.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Good descriptions throughout story.
- By Anonymous User on 09-04-24
By: Gustave Flaubert
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- Length: 15 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 347
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 273
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 272
Before marrying, Emma Bovary believed she would enter a life of luxury and passion like the sentimental stories she'd read in her novels and magazines. Now married to an ordinary country doctor her life is not the romantic ideal she imagined and seeks an escape through having extra-marital affairs. This devastating spiral into deceit and despair leads to catastrophic consequences. Emma Bovary continues to be enjoyed to this day because of its profound humanity, still as fresh today as when it was first written.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
Written over a century and a half ago, Madame Bovary is still an extraordinarily fresh, exciting, and shockingly frank novel, at once an acute psychological study of a woman drawn into adultery through circumstances we can partly understand, and a sharply-observed comedy that offers a fascinating glimpse of the social and cultural divisions running through French provincial society in the mid-nineteenth century.
By: Gustave Flaubert
-
Madame Bovary
- By: Gustave Flaubert
- Narrated by: Davina Porter
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 369
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 262
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 264
Emma Bovary is not content to be the mere dutiful wife of a French country doctor. She yearns for excitement and a sense of romance that pulls at her so strongly she is powerless to resist, even though pursuing her dreams will exact a terrible price. Learn why Gustave Flaubert's compelling heroine has enchanted and puzzled readers for centuries.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Now Here's a Story
- By P. Giorgio on 09-06-03
By: Gustave Flaubert
-
Madame Bovary
- Penguin Classics
- By: Gustave Flaubert
- Narrated by: Fiona Glascott
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 34
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 28
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 29
Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment, and the consequences are devastating. Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Irritating French pronunciation
- By Amazon Customer on 10-02-20
By: Gustave Flaubert
-
Madame Bovary
- By: Gustave Flaubert
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 14 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 651
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 579
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 574
In Madame Bovary, one of the great novels of 19th-century France, Flaubert draws a deeply felt and sympathetic portrait of a woman who, having married a country doctor and found herself unhappy with a rural, genteel existence, longs for love and excitement. However, her aspirations and her desires to escape only bring her further disappointment and eventually lead to unexpected, painful consequences. Flaubert’s critical portrait of bourgeois provincial life remains as powerful as ever
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Excellent narrator, beautiful writing
- By DHW on 06-11-14
By: Gustave Flaubert
-
Madame Bovary
- By: Gustave Flaubert
- Narrated by: Glenda Jackson
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 6
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 4
-
Story3.5 out of 5 stars 4
Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, Emma is not content to be the mere dutiful wife of a French country doctor. She believes she was meant for something more—a life of luxury, leisure, and, above all, true and passionate love. She spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and throws herself headlong into a reckless series of doomed affairs. Soon heartbroken and crippled by debts, she takes drastic action, with tragic consequences for her husband and daughter.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Good descriptions throughout story.
- By Anonymous User on 09-04-24
By: Gustave Flaubert
-
Madame Bovary
- By: Gustave Flaubert, Gerard Hopkins - translator
- Narrated by: Ronald Pickup
- Length: 15 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 347
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 273
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 272
Before marrying, Emma Bovary believed she would enter a life of luxury and passion like the sentimental stories she'd read in her novels and magazines. Now married to an ordinary country doctor her life is not the romantic ideal she imagined and seeks an escape through having extra-marital affairs. This devastating spiral into deceit and despair leads to catastrophic consequences. Emma Bovary continues to be enjoyed to this day because of its profound humanity, still as fresh today as when it was first written.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Fantastic Narrator
- By A. Laprade-velasco on 07-18-10
By: Gustave Flaubert, and others
-
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- By: Gustave Flaubert
- Narrated by: Peter Dann
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
-
Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
-
Story0 out of 5 stars 0
Written over a century and a half ago, Madame Bovary is still an extraordinarily fresh, exciting, and shockingly frank novel, at once an acute psychological study of a woman drawn into adultery through circumstances we can partly understand, and a sharply-observed comedy that offers a fascinating glimpse of the social and cultural divisions running through French provincial society in the mid-nineteenth century.
By: Gustave Flaubert
What listeners say about Madame Bovary
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Adam
- 08-16-22
5-star performance of a classic
Julie Christie gives a brilliant performance of this classic, which is generally regarded as the “first work” of modern realist literature.
Another reviewer has attacked Christie’s performance with some ridiculous claims; he must have heard some other version or have some other axe to grind. (I heard a total of 2 errors in her pronunciation, which is normal for any audiobook, plus British pronunciations of some words where he likely didn’t know that the pronunciation differs from American English. And her pacing is great.)
And I was prepared to believe his cranky review — normally, I avoid celebrity readings. Famous actors do not make great voice actors.
While film actors have a very pleasant narrating voice, they tend to lack variety in pacing and tone over the course of a long work, and their “voices” tend to fall apart if there are more than 4 or 5 characters. The upshot is that audiobooks by famous actors usually sound more like a nice story time at the library, rather than a genuinely professional audiobook performance.
SO Christie’s performance here is doubly praiseworthy — her voice acting is *superb*.
She clearly put forth the effort to learn this other craft, and the reader is rewarded with a remarkable performance that is by turns sensitive, biting, dry, funny. There are a huge number of characters, male and female, young and old, rich and poor, and Christie embodies them all with aplomb. Her voice acting is on par with the greats in this field.
I also listened to portions of the other top editions of this work, and Christie’s stands out as the most engrossing and listenable — she is nimble and natural and has clearly thought through the tone of each passage.
Other readers by comparison often default to pompous, breathy, over-emotive narration to emphasize that “you’re listening to a classic.” If you’ve ever listened to a famous work and felt just sick of the narrator half way through, that is often why. Christie, pointedly, does not make this novice error.
As for the novel itself? Well — “It’s a classic!” right? 😉
I actually don’t love this novel, but it’s certainly worth reading at least once. In general I don’t care for 19th century French lit, and among works of that time and place, I enjoy this one more than most. (And it’s not a demanding work to follow or enjoy.)
So if you do plan to add this list to the list of great works you’ve tackled, I cannot recommend Christie’s reading highly enough. This is a 5-star production.
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Scott Mendeloff
- 03-02-19
Savaging a Masterpiece
Reading this classic, Julie Christie’s halting, error-smattered effort does great disservice to this lovely book. Choose a different option.
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3 people found this helpful