Madame Bovary and the Impossibility of Re-reading - Anjali Joseph

 
“The first time I read Madame Bovary I was fourteen or fifteen. My family lived in England; at school I was learning French. Denise King, my French teacher, lent me her copy of the book, which was the one she’d used in university. I think it was a Gallimard paperback, but not a pocket edition. It had a primrose yellow cover with no picture. The paper was thick. Denise, as an undergraduate, had looked up all the words she didn’t know, and written the English in the margin. The novel is not written in very complicated language but it was a stretch for me at that point. I wasn’t very comfortable with the past historic tense which is usually only used in written French. The reward for wading through the book was a story about a depressing guy named Charles in rural nineteenth century Normandy. ...”

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