real rating: 2,5 * - 3,5*
I honestly do not know how to feel about this book. There were bits that I liked, parts that I disliked and chunks that I tolerated for the sake of reading...
I feel like I am full of contradictions: I liked the language, but thoroughly disliked the overly long descriptions; the book more often than not tired me, but I still couldn't stop reading it (I have to admit that I had really great expectations(no pun intended) for this book).

This novel depicts the dawdling decay into debauchery of Emma Bovary. Emma's sentimental readings give her an inauthentic vision of life's potential and an eternal dissatisfaction with what she has. Rodolphe, her first lover, mimics romantic discourse in his seducer's letter of rupture, reducing words to empty husks, vehicles of lies, in the same way that Léon, the besotted, blue-eyed lawyer's clerk, can spout only poetic clichés, viewing his lover solely through current stereotypes (see part 3, the odalisque bathing)...

Although, something I really liked was Emma's ever changing description: early on in the novel her eyes appear to be 'brown', then 'black in the shadow and deep blue in the daylight', afterwards simply 'blue' and so on. From what I have gathered, Flaubert was the least careless writer imaginable and it seems as though he is subverting a conventional part of any character description - but to what end? Is it to make Emma yet more ungraspable, and therefore even closer to reality? Or is it to make a possible bonding experience between her and the reader somewhat harder (or just for the fun of confusion, lol)?