Yes, that’s for sure, you had to dare. Flaubert all the same… One of the major works of French literature… But what a dazzling success! Even those who have not read “Madame Bovary”, or for whom this title is only a distant memory that has become an expression to mock provincial women, will be able to enjoy “Un honest homme”. And no doubt having the irrepressible desire to (re) read the mythical novel published in 1857, which we often forget is also entitled “Mœurs de province”. Because not only Isabelle Flaten knows her classics well, but in addition she handles the language with such dexterity that she gently immerses her entire reader in a past where he suddenly feels like a fish in water. Where he feels in his time. In the same way as she had done with “Adelphe” in 2019, transporting us by the sole grace of her singular writing to the beginning of the XXe century as if we were living there, as if we were dreaming there. This time, we put on a 19th century costumee century, initially fearing to feel perhaps a little embarrassed at the armholes… and again the magic happens. We are there, in the head of Charles Bovary. In Emma’s as well. The writer from Strasbourg, and living in Nancy, slipped into all the interstices that Gustave Flaubert left when he wrote the story of this famous provincial doctor’s wife who is bored to death. The exercise is fascinating.
It was time to take a closer look at how things were going on the husband’s side
But how did the idea come to him? “I had read Madame Bovary during my adolescence. Rereading it a few decades later, it occurred to me that Charles was the great absentee from this novel and I wanted to make him exist. Flaubert does not spare it. But he shows such passivity in the face of the ups and downs of life and those of his married life in particular, that it made me wonder, “answers Isabelle Flaten, who admits to having hesitated for a long time to seize such a position. landmark of literature. Emma Bovary had once saddened her so much, “as if she pointed out to me my sad destiny as a woman, confined to blossoming only through feelings and appearance, educated to please, ready for all humiliations to drop out love… And then time did its job, put words to these thousand-year-old female shackles of which Emma Bovary is the emblematic illustration, at least in her milieu”. So it was time to take a closer look at how things were going on the husband’s side. To go and meet this Charles Bovary, an honest man struggling so much to fulfill the role that society has assigned to him. “Challenging the injunctions made to women is, it seems to me, also calling into question those made to men. Because isn’t it from there, from this impossibility of being oneself beyond one’s gender, that very often the incommunicability arises in the couple and in society in general? To speak of Charles is not to deny Emma, it is to attempt to say two irreconcilable worlds, so foreign are they to each other through the imposed models. »
Pleased to meet you, Monsieur Bovary.
« an honest man by Isabelle Flaten. 224 pages. €19. Ed. Anne Carriere.
