The young and pretty Emma Bovary, daughter of a rather wealthy farmer, becomes the second wife fo country doctor Charles Bovary.  They met when he set the broken leg of her father, a job that earned her father's respect for him and gave him a bit of a reputation in and around the vlage Charles lives in.  She expects her marriage to be a highlight of romance, just like she read in so many novels, but soon she is disapointed in her life and in her husband, who obviously can't give her those highlights.  When they move to Yonville and settle next to the local pharmacist she hopes again for that spark but it just doesn't come.

A platonic affair with the clerk Léon does bring a little of that excitement she so longs for in her boring life.  When he moves away to finish his studies though she is not that heart-broken as this affair too didn't bring her what she longed for.  She starts an affair with Rodolphe.  But he only wants the fun part, and when her plans for moving away with him become too close to reality he flees.  She meets Léon again, and this time the affair is no longer platonic.

She makes up for a reason to travel to Léon on a regular basis, but those travels and everything else she acquires to build her fairy-tale life are not for free.  She has debts, and her solution for paying back is to create new debts.  This cannot go on of course, and when bankrupcy is unavoidable she takes a drastic decision...

The story in itself is not that exceptional, it is rather straightforward, well told.  What makes this particular novel so exceptional is the layer of fine mockery over it, the irony with which Flaubert depicts the French middle class in the mid 1800's.  And the nice thing is, today it is just as relevant as it was back then, as the main theme is not the adultry, but the reasons for her longings that cannot be fulfilled.  Just like Don Quijote she bases her desires on what poor literature tells her, she feels her romantic novels have more truth than life itself.  Compare to today, where people do the most crazy things just because what they see on MTV is their ideal.  At the same time Emma Bovary continuously complains about everything, yet she fails to see that all she ever longed for is right there, she could be the most happy woman in the world if she would just be thankful for what she has, rather than reach for everything she has not.  That too is all around us today, for everyone who cares to look.

I read somewhere that Flaubert has an extremely good style, the writing is just perfect, not a chapter, not a phrase can be omitted.  Couldn't say, my Dutch translation is not quite in the language he wrote.  Yet I do see here too the careful writing, every thought, every word has its place, and still it reads "like a train" (Dutch expression).
Yep, this one is among my favorites...