Still plugging along

I have decided that until I finish MADAME BOVARY I will not start another book. I am currently 1/2 way through the book. I must admit that the small print is driving my eyes absolutely nuts. The next book I am reading is also small print and I am trying to figure out away to save my eyes. Maybe I will get one of those handheld magnifying glasses from the Victorian Age. It would be appropriate for the books I am reading.

There is a comment on the back of my MADAME BOVARY book, it is from the introduction by Victor Brombert: "Madame Bovary is a surprisingly romantic and deeply moving text, as wellas a work of pioneering modernity... Flaubert's anti-heroic heroine in fact acquires a haunting nobility through her relentless quest for the  absolute experience."

I have a problem with this thought, simply due to the last line: "through her relentless quest for the absolute experience." See so far in this book, she spends her time sitting in her room romanticizing about what it means to be in love, what she thinks should be love, knights in shining armor, good looking men, who save her from her dull life. She realizes that she is not in love with the good doctor, because he is tired at the end of the evening. She plays at both mother and wife, while secretly yearning to be away from both husband and child. To be with her current interest Monsieur de Leon, who is a clerk. She seems to be stuck in a rut of her own making, does she invite people over, no, some show up, but she never has a party. She expects others to throw parties and invite her. Granted she feels like they have no money, and they probably do not, however, she seems to feeding the town anyway, so why not come up with a party. Instead, like I said before that she bemoans her fate, a quest would indicate doing something, instead of pining away for what she believes she does not have from her husband.

Again I am only 1/2 way through the book, maybe in the second half we have a change.