Over the Clover

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary (Oxford World's Classics)

Gustave Flaubert

★★★★

The fascinating thing about Madame Bovary is, well, Madame Bovary. Is she a sympathetic but flawed character, or is she a cruel and selfish woman?

Emma Bovary's main problem is that she believes money will end all her problems. But then most people today hold that same false belief.

I think how a person relates to this character says a lot about who he/she is.

It's sort of a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't kind of question though.

On one hand, if you sympathize with her you have to admit that you understand such a heightened level of egoism and self-delusion.

But if you don't sympathize with her it feels a bit sexist since it was a repressive, patriarchal class structure that undoubtedly created women similar to this fictional woman.

I'm still trying to figure out what I think of the character of Madame Bovary, but what I found particularly engaging about this book was its narrative form. I bet one could take a whole class on what Flaubert did with the narrative in just this one book.

One thing I can say with certainty is that my heart has never broken so much for a character as it did for the equally flawed Charles Bovary. I wonder what that says about me?

Final Three

I finished Fireman Flower, the short story collection by William Sansom I was reading with a friend. The last three stories were somehow more odd that the previous nine.

The Inspector is about a guy who won't bend the rules even though its in everybody's best interest, including his own.

Saturation Point is by far the strangest story I've ever read. Sansom must have been having a bad trip while writing it because no one could have come up with that without some bad chemicals dancing around in the old skull.

Then Fireman Flower, the story the book is named for comes in very last. It's about a fireman with the last name Flower who goes to fight a fire he thinks will be very important and hallucinates for fifty pages. And then there is no end. None. It just ends.

Honestly I think the book would have been stronger without the last story, but somehow it not only made the collection--the collection was named after it.

I have heard that this is not the strongest collection of stories by Sansom. Several of the stories were very memorable. Difficulty with a Bouqet, In the Maze, The Witnesses, and The Long Sheet will stick with me I know. I have read a few of his other stories and found them more suspenseful or moving, whatever the case may be, than the majority of these.

Sansom does have a tendency toward the abstract, and often it takes a paragraph or a page to really understand what is going on. Other times he gives way more detail to the reader than necessary. More than anything, I would bet that is why his work has largely been forgotten in the last fifty years. Too bad becauses the stories that work really are quite unique and gripping.

Midway

Continuing with the short stories of Sansom, the next six are all over the map. Sansom seemed to like to write in a variety of genres which is evident here.

Difficulty with a Bouquet is about a lost opportunity. It could best be described as whimsical and philosophical. One of my favorites.

The Maze had a Tim Burton feel to me. It was creepy without every making me feel afraid. Sansom threw in a bit too much Eastern thought for my liking, but overall I'd give this one great marks for atmosphere.

The Witnesses I'd describe as psychological horror. Very little happens in the story, but it ends with the main character's death.

The Long Sheet is one of Sansom's most famous and popular stories. The topic is the nature of freedom told through a variety of prisoners' actions. One of his best.

Pansovic and the Spiders is my least favorite Sansom story to this point. Too much is spelled out for the reader.

The Wall is simply putting a story behind the old silent movie gag of a wall falling down but not hurting the man who happens to be standing when the open door or window falls on him

Now to finish the last stories to go in book...

First three

We finished reading the first three Sansom stories.

The first, Through the Quinquina Glass, is about marriage and how secrets and power can be dangerous.
The Peach House Potting Shed is a strange tale about a man who lives alternately between a peach house and a potting shed.
The Forbidden Lighthouse is quite lengthy at fifty or so pages. It tells the story of a community of people who are both obsessed, and feel guilty over their obsession, to a nearby lighthouse.

Each story has its moments, and I would definitely say they were unique.

The one thing they each has in common is a character whose life seems to unravel after a choice he made. In the first story a man finds out his wife cheated on him and decides not to let his wife know he knows. The second protagonist takes a job that cuts him off from the outside world, and in the third story a decision is made to accept living in a McCarthyesque society rather than leave.

William Sansom

A friend and I are going to be reading a book of William Sansom's short stories together. I'm really excited! He was an author whose works were supposed to end up as classics one day, but for some reason he has been all but forgotten. His books, if you can find them, are all out-of-print. I'm interested to know if there is an answer in his stories to why he was forgotten...