“Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.”

Madame Bovary craves beauty, wealth, passion, and love, measuring her life against the great epics about which she would read. Dissatisfied, she turns to extramarital affairs, to spending she cannot afford, always reaching farther for her idols only to find them covered in gilt. Her life, empty and dissatisfied as it is, is made vivid by the depth of detail and realism as it is told, culminating in the destruction of the lives of those around her and her own self-destruction.

Flaubert would spend 12 hours a day at his desk, painstakingly attending to detail and always searching for le mot juste, the right word. He believed prose should be as perfect as poetry in its word choice, and sought in every sentence to perfectly capture the mood, the atmosphere, and the exact detail of the scene. In doing so, he created an entire literary genre, realist narration, and he is justly considered one of the greatest Western novelists for his influence on authors as diverse as Kafka, Coetzee, and Sartre.

What makes Madame Bovary so good is that attention to detail. The story was begun by Flaubert at the urging of his friends, who hoped to cure his realism by giving him the dreariest subject they could think of. Not, I would observe, the most successful stratagem I’ve heard. Yet he does meet their request: little that is out of the ordinary happens in the book, and yet the narrative is compelling as Emma Bovary pursues a downward spiral of vanity and delusion. I don’t tend to read this kind of fiction, preferring Bildungsromanic stories of self-actualization to stories of the fall, but as a story of the costs of obsession with material comforts and status, a Stoic would struggle to do better.

“Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at least came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them…”

“For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! Not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.”

Whaling is an activity that has persisted since prehistoric times, peaking in the 1800s with the harvesting of oil from sperm whales, with their population falling from over a million before commercial sperm whaling to less than a third of that by the time whaling was banned by a moratorium in 1982. In 1842, however, a young man would abandon the whaling ship he was working on to live among reputed cannibals and pursue love affairs with local girls. He would recount these events in bestselling books when he returned home, before destroying his career with a book that received almost universally scathing reviews: Moby-Dick, now listed among the Great American Novels, even called the best book ever written.

At its best, Moby-Dick is excellent: it’s moving, it’s insightful, and it very much captures the sense of the sacred, the spiritual relationship of crew to whale or man to obsession. It can also be fascinating in its detail: entire chapters are devoted to the anatomy of the whale, the symbolism of the colour white, or the role of the whale in art and history. Phrases like “Call me Ishmael” are some of the best known of any book, even among people who haven’t read the original source: it is but one of many unforgettable phrases. Though broadly pro-whaling, it also even has some sympathy with the whales, confronting the fact that the activity necessarily involves tormenting the animals.

For all that, let me confess I found it a little boring, philistine as that may make me. I’m not one to quail at historical detail given my passion for history, and those parts I enjoyed, but particularly the first half I found slow, long descriptive sections filling space between more interesting parts. The book has some great sections and some great lines, but I wouldn’t have minded were it considerably shorter. Still, as a reflection on the personality of man and the necessities of the energy industry, it has much to tell us today: the oil we burn, though not literally in lamps and candles, can still cost blood.