Tuesday, September 26, 2006

"Madame Bovary" at 150

Good news for fans of Julian Barnes and Flaubert (including new Madame Bovary readers like my young friend Camille in Paris), reports signandsight:
A hundred and fifty years ago, on October 1, 1856, a preprint of Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary appeared in the Revue de Paris. To mark the occasion, Julian Barnes, "the most Flaubertian of British writers" has written a story exclusively for the Nouvel Obs, in which Emma Bovary doesn't die but rather tells the story of how her life continued after she and her husband left Yonville. "The mushrooms didn't contain enough poison. I survived. I'm sorry to have botched the story but facts are facts. I don't kill myself out of desperation; rather, I nearly died from my emotionality."
If you read French, click here to read Barnes' story. Don't read French? Then plug the URL into the online translator of Le Nouvel Observateur and you'll come up with...nothing like Barnes or Flaubert would ever write.

--Marshal Zeringue