DoubleX Gabfest: The Book Club
Slate's DoubleX Gabfest on the new translation of Madame Bovary.
Updated Thursday, Dec. 30, 2010, at 10:19 AM
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In this week's gabfest, DoubleX's Emily Bazelon and Hanna Rosin, along with The New Yorker'sMargaret Talbot, discuss Lydia Davis' new translation of the 19th-century classic Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. All agree that the jacket copy describing Bovary as the "original desperate housewife" is crude but totally accurate. Rosin marvels at the scene where Bovary and her lover ride around in a sealed carriage. Talbot is horrified by the club-foot incident. Bazelon asks whether we are really supposed to find nothing redeeming in these narrow bourgeois caricatures. Bazelon is also exceedingly excited by the death by poison finale.
Articles we discuss:
Kathryn Harrison's review in the New York Times.
Ruth Franklin's "Why is Emma Bovary so Maligned and Misunderstood?" in the New Republic.
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Hanna Rosin is the author of The End of Men, a co-founder of Slate's DoubleX and a senior editor at the Atlantic. She can be reached at hanna.rosin@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook or visit her website.
Margaret Talbot is a staff writer for The New Yorker.
Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor and writes about law, family, and kids. She is also the Truman Capote Fellow at Yale Law School and a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. Her new book is Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Empathy and Character. Find her at emilybazelon@gmail.com or on Facebook or Twitter.
Illustration by Deanna Staffo.