france-eesti wrote:It's not very much like Madame Bovary - Because Emma is still shown as a "victim", whereas I believe Anna isn't finally a very good character - as she abandons her husband, and both her children (and it is hinted that she doesn't love her daughter very much).
I think they're actually more similar than you give them credit for. Bovary is ultimately a victim of her own harebrained romantic notions, just like Anna.
My ex used Proust (in French) as his bedtime reading. He was rereading it, actually, and even though he loved it he also found it ridiculous at times. He once read me out an entire passage written using a verb tense that no one uses nowadays. And I remember him saying once, "If Proust's mother had just kissed him goodnight, he would have written much shorter books."
I'm bored with the books I'm reading so I bought and started another one, Pilátus by Magda Szabó, translated into English by George Szirtes as Iza's ballad. Somehow it didn't occur to me that a novel about an elderly widow moving with her daughter would begin with the story of how she became a widow, so the first few chapters have been tough going. I think it's honestly easier for me to read a novel with torture and gore than to read one where a quiet trusting soul gets put through the ringer by someone who "only wants what's best" for them.
Oh, and for Halloween, I started The old gods waken by Manly Wade Wellman. His contrived "Appalachian vernacular" is kinda irritating and it's been ridiculously exposition-heavy and hardly creepy at all so far, but I'm hoping it will get better.