Madame Bovary

This is the story of an ill-married woman, her mediocre husband, her selfish and vain lovers, her dreams, her chimeras, her death. It's the story of a narrow, devout, bourgeois province. It's also the story of the French novel. There was nothing in this picture to shock Second Empire society. But, inexorable as a tragedy, flamboyant as a drama, biting as a comedy, the book had given itself a formidable weapon: style. For this real crime, Flaubert found himself in court.
No novel is innocent: this one less than any other. To read Madame Bovary, in the XXIᵉ century, is to confront the scandal represented by a work as sincere as it is compelling. It's an offensive, corrosive book, whose irony outrages all our values, and literature itself, which has never really recovered.