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Hello and welcome to our Double X Audio Book Club. Today we are going to discuss the new

translation of Madame Bovary by Lydia Davis, originally written in 1857 by Gustave Flaubert. We will say, Happy New Year to you all, or Bonne, as Gustave Flaubert would say. I'm here. This is Hanna Rosen. I am the editor of Double X, and I'm joined here today in the Washington studio with Margaret Talbot of the New Yorker. Hi, Margaret. Hi, there. And we have joining us in New Haven, Emily Bazelon, the other editor of Double X, hi. Bonjour. We have to make French jokes throughout these podcasts. So, Madam Bovary, all of you might remember this from college. If you don't remember it, you should reread it. It's really an amazing experience to reread it. I had utterly forgotten how depressing the depressing the book is. She's described in the jacket copy as the original Desperate Housewife. And while that's a rather crass description, I think it's kind of perfect. Yes, it's actually not inaccurate, both in the way that Floubert kind of coldly anthropologizes her. He sort of coldly describes her and in the way we are all welcomed to join in her misery.

The translation has stirred a little literary kerfawful about whether or not we are too hard on

Madame Bovary. And so we will talk a little bit about that. But I will start before she even

becomes Madame Bovary, because one thing I had completely forgotten is that the novel opens

with a description of Charles, her husband, and his childhood. The first chapter is devoted

to him and is quite cruel to him. I mean, describes him as puny and feeble and rather unhappy.

Slow. Slow. Slow. And yet Charles ultimately turns out to be quite sympathetic. So what

did you guys think of Charles and his, you know, his portrayal

early on? How is he presented to us and why? There's this description of him where Floubert

says his mother kept him always trailing after her. She would cut out cardboard figures for him,

tell him stories, converse with him in endless monologues, full of melancholy whimsy and beguiling

chatter. And, you know, here we go.

He's a mama's boy set up to be led around by the nose by his future wife.

Right.

And his mother, who never leaves him alone, right?

Right.

And who doesn't like his wife?

...