Madame Bovary (Lydia Davis Translation)

A literary event: one of the world's most celebrated novels, in a magnificent new translation

Seven years ago, Lydia Davis brought us an award-winning, rapturously reviewed new translation of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way that was hailed as "clear and true to the music of the original" (Los Angeles Times) and "a work of creation in its own right" (Claire Messud, Newsday). Now she turns her gifts to the book that redefined the novel as an art form.

Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she is married to the provincial doctor Charles Bovary yet harbors dreams of an elegant and passionate life. Escaping into sentimental novels, she finds her fantasies dashed by the tedium of her days. Motherhood proves to be a burden; religion is only a brief distraction. In an effort to make her life everything she believes it should be, she spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and embarks on two disappointing affairs. Soon heartbroken and crippled by debts, Emma takes drastic action with tragic consequences for her husband and daughter.

When published in 1857, Madame Bovary was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for its heroine. Today the novel is considered the first masterpiece of realist fiction. Flaubert sought to tell the story objectively, without romanticizing or moralizing (hence the uproar surrounding its publication), but whereas he was famously fastidious about his literary style, many of the English versions seem to tell the story in their own style. In this landmark translation, Lydia Davis honors the nuances and particulars of a style that has long beguiled readers of French, giving new life in English to Flaubert's masterwork.

The New York Times - Kathryn Harrison

Given the pressure Flaubert applied to each sentence, there is no greater test of a translator's art than Madame Bovary. Faithful to the style of the original, but not to the point of slavishness, Davis's effort is transparent—the reader never senses her presence. For Madame Bovary, hers is the level of mastery required…It is a shame Flaubert will never read Davis's translation…Even he would have to agree his masterwork has been given the English translation it deserves.

Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) was born in Rouen, France, the younger son of a provincial doctor. At age eighteen he was sent to study law in Paris but was afflicted with a mysterious nervous ailment and retired after only three years to live with his widowed mother. Supported by a private income, he devoted himself to his writing. The success of Madame Bovary, his first novel, was ensured when it was deemed immoral by the French government. Flaubert went on to write Salammbô, Sentimental Education, and Three Tales, and his fame and reputation grew steadily after his death with the publication of his unfinished comic masterpiece Bouvard and Pécuchet and the many remarkable volumes of his correspondence.

Lydia Davis was awarded the 2003 French-American Foundation Translation Prize for her translation of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of such modern writers as Proust, Maurice Blanchot, and Michel Leiris. She is the author of one novel, The End of the Story, and four volumes of stories, including Varieties of Disturbance, a National Book Award finalist. Her stories were recently brought together in one volume, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which was called "a grand cumulative achievement" and "one of the great, strange American literary contributions" by James Wood in The New Yorker, and "one of the great books in recent literature" by Dan Chiasson in The New York Review of Books. A MacArthur Fellow, Davis lives near Albany, New York.