Description
Book SynopsisIn his Introduction, MacKenzie discusses Flaubert's life, the writing of Madame Bovary, the world in which the novel is set, and its publication and reception. Footnotes, a bibliography, and a chronology are also provided.
Trade ReviewAfter his beautiful translation of Baudelaire's Paris Spleen, Raymond N. MacKenzie now offers us a fresh, superb version of Madame Bovary by Flaubert. Impeccably transparent, this new translation captures the original's careful, precise language and admirably conveys the small-mindedness of nineteenth-century provincial French towns. MacKenzie's tour de force transports the reader to Yonville and compels him to look at Emma with Flaubert's calm, disenchanted eyes. --Thomas Pavel, Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago
Raymond N. MacKenzie's fresh and faithful translation of Madame Bovary will enable a new generation of readers to discover the wonderful complexities of Flaubert's sardonic presentation of the yawning gulf between a woman's expectations of life and the realities she finds in nineteenth-century provincial France. By capturing the rhythms of the original French, and adopting a vocabulary which is neither too contemporary nor too dated, MacKenzie gives his readers the opportunity to enter into the heart of one of the great classics of world literature. --Rosemary Lloyd, Rudy Professor of French, Emerita, Indiana University
