Book Review: "Charles Bovary, Country Doctor" by Jean Améry

This book opens as most beautifully written books open unfortunately, with loss. The book opens with a funeral and it is actually really upsetting. I mean, it is written so beautifully, so calmly and yet there is something whilst you are reading it that feels like the narrator is about to break out and scream. Just check this out:

“Three coffins and inside them, that delectable body which will rot, as they taught me in medical school. That is why I cannot sleep. I wander upstairs and down through the night, hardly caring that the child is resting. I call for the dead: not too loud, but enough that I hear my own voice. I open my arms to catch her, I steal off to the alcove, where her scent still lingers. Perhaps I only imagine I can smell her, and were Homais to enter, he would detect nothing but the chlorine powder he brings from him laboratory to strew in lavish quantities in the name of hygiene and public health. It makes no difference, I smell what I smell, and it is my concern, like her death. They loved her, but still, they will forget her…”

This is from near the start of the book and really, it is one of the most heart-felt openings I have ever read. The only problem I think people would have with this book would be that you really would have no idea what was going on if you had not read “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert in the first place.

There are quotations about social status that seem to be some of the most critical in the world of Madame Bovary I have ever read and seriously, they are quite breathtaking. Just have a look at this quotation in which there is a description of social status:

“They live up there in the castles, they know the flight of birds. Their tailcoats are made of the finest cloth, and their exquisite pomades give their hair a silken gleam. Their kerchiefs are monogrammed and exude sweet scenes. Their gazes show the indifference of those used to daily gratifying their whims, to giving orders with a heavy hand to force to get their way, whether riding a purebred horse to death or else loose women in bed…”

It is a brilliant passage that teaches us about not only the social status about some of the characters but tells us of the perception of these characters from the outside. It is a brilliant piece in which we get a critical but obviously bitter look at the way in which those of higher social status have nothing better to do.

The writer writes about Gustave Flaubert in a way that is very obviously a reference to link Charles Bovary as a character to his own perception of himself. It is something that Gustave Flaubert apparently thought of himself but this is converted to a perception from the audience/reader and it is just fantastic:

“One way would be to pose the question to the one who cannot answer us: he has been dust for nearly a century now in the family plot in Rouen, the lovely city the Norman Conquerors raised to the first rank in the ninth century. When we pound at his gravestone, Gustave Flaubert is silent. But his reality, we may surmise, even if it lingers only in thoughts, phantasms, the words of others, often those born long afterwards. There is also testimony: the books, the letters, the countless learned dissertations. It, this reality, which must be couched between dubious quotation marks, may help us in our quest for the hidden - by Flaubert - Charles Bovary, officier de santé, dupe, whom all our sympathy is owed, even if we do not wish to detract from our love for Emma, for Madame Bovary, who breaks free of the prison of her time and world, who breaks free and falls to earth tragically, where her disconsolate widower wisher to dig her out with his bare hands, once more to press her cadaver to his sorrowful, passionate heart…”

That, so far, is one of the most beautiful things I have read that is written about another, powerful book of love and death.