“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.