Misty France

Book: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

This book may get you all hot and bothered. But not because of the over-sexed heroine. Even T.V. commercials get more blatant today. No. Flaubert will seduce you with scenery. When I go to France,  Madame Emma Bovary will take me by the hand and lead me through both the stifling middle-class towns and her big city escape to Rouen.

I know that regular readers are familiar with my definition of books that inspire travel.  Sometimes they are biographies, histories, or novels.  So today I am going to propose that Madame Bovary makes a terrific traveler’s book if you long to go to–or just know more about–Normandy.

We covered some of this territory when Jessie Voigts talked about the excellent travel book, A Journey Into Flaubert’s Normandy. If you read that book, you will have a stop-by-stop guide to the places that scholars have deduced must have been used by Flaubert in writing his novel.

As for me, I can only say that my recent re-reading of Madame Bovary left me with a great yearning (something Madame Bovary specialized in–yearning) to see the lovely region that Flaubert describes.

On approaching the city in a coach:

Then on a sudden the town appeared.  Sloping down like an amphitheatre, and drowned in the fog, it widened out beyond the bridges confusedly.  Then the open country spread away with a monotonous movement till it touched in the distance the vague line of the pale sky.  Seen thus from above, the whole landscape looked immovable as a picture; the anchored ships were massed in one corner, the river curved round the foot of the green hills, and the isles, oblique in shape lay on the water like large, motionless, black fishes…The leafless trees on the boulevards made violet thickets in the midst of the houses, and the roofs, all shining with the rain, threw back unequal reflections…

I want TO SEE THAT!! NOW!!

Flaubert, like all writers, agonized over finding the right words. One of his characters, trying to say the right words to the passionate Emma,  speaks the writer’s woe

...no one can every give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.

It is a book well worth reading, if you love language and the writer’s art, or if you love traveling and would like to meet Flaubert’s Normandy. At the time he published it, critics were shocked at his portrayal of s-e-x. They missed the descriptions of the land and people–an aphrodisiac to the traveler.

Okay, tell the truth–have you ever been turned on by a travel book?

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Great Big Literary  Giveaway Prize for This Weekend: Decoding the Lost Symbol by Simon Cox, which goes through The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown puzzle by puzzle and solves them all.  See my interview with Simon Cox here. Mention the book in the comments on any post or tweet the proper message (see rules here) to win this weekend drawing, which will close at midnight on Sunday, Jan. 17.

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Books: A Journey into Flaubert’s Normandy by Susannah Patton and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

A GUEST POST BY Dr. Jessie Voigts

Gustave Flaubert is considered one of the greatest Western writers (who among us hasn’t read Madame Bovary?), due to his love of – and search for – finding the right words to express himself.  I recently read an incredible book about Flaubert – and, importantly – about Normandy and his sense of place and home.

The west facade of the Cathedrale Notre-Dame, which dominates the center of Rouen. Much of the cathedral was built in the Norman gothic style in the thirteenth century.

The book? A Journey into Flaubert’s Normandy, by Susannah Patton. [Part of the ArtPlace Series by Roaring Forties Press]The book is filled with incredible photos and paintings of Flaubert and his contemporaries, the buildings and landscape around Normandy, and his family home in Croisset.  You can definitely plan an extraordinary literary travel tour based on this treasure of a book – but you may also be an armchair traveler, delving into Flaubert and France at will.

We were lucky enough to sit down and chat with Susannah about Flaubert, Normandy, literary research, and travel. Here’s what she had to say…

WE:  Please tell us about your book, A Journey into Flaubert’s Normandy…

SP: The book is a literary travel guide that explores the relationship between a writer and his native region. Specifically, it’s an examination of the love-hate relationship Flaubert had with his home turf. Flaubert spent most of his life in Rouen and its environs, but also considered his fellow Normans to be “bourgeois” and close-minded. My hope is that the book will serve both as a guide for those who want to explore Rouen and surrounding countryside and seascapes, and also as a window into a time, a place and a writer’s often conflicted life.

See the rest of the interview at Wandering Educators.

All photos courtesy and copyright of Peter Feichtmeir, captions from book Flaubert ‘s Normandy.

Dr. Jessie Voigts is the Publisher of  WanderingEducators.com and  contributes each month to A Traveler’s Library. She has a doctorate in International Education, and is passionate about intercultural learning. She and her husband are Worldschooling their daughter, and enjoying every minute of it. She is also a nature photographer and lives on a lake.

Local farmers sell their wares at Lyons-la-Foret's marketplace, which Claude Chabral restored before filming Madame Bovary there in the early 1990's.

Thanks to Jessie, and I hope that you will go over to Wandering Educators and read the rest of the review. Since I recently read both Flaubert’s Normany and Madame Bovary, I just have to add that one of my favorite parts of the former was the description of the battle between two towns to be the real town of Emma Bovary. Rhys, a straight and narrow town both geographically and morally, provides a tour of Emma’s places. Lyons de Foret, more picturesque, has served as the movie set for film versions. Although Flaubert piles on the details in his writing to make the scenes seem real, it is probable that he blended characteristics of people and places he knew when he was writing his fiction.

Have you been to the Normandy of Flaubert?  Did you find scenes that reminded you of his works?

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©2010 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.