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Madame Bovary
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 14 hrs and 14 mins
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In Madame Bovary, one of the great novels of 19th-century France, Flaubert draws a deeply felt and sympathetic portrait of a woman who, having married a country doctor and found herself unhappy with a rural, genteel existence, longs for love and excitement. However, her aspirations and her desires to escape only bring her further disappointment and eventually lead to unexpected, painful consequences. Flaubert’s critical portrait of bourgeois provincial life remains as powerful as ever.
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The doorbell rings, just days after my beloved husband’s sudden death. I don’t recognise the woman on our doorstep, with her blonde highlights, a diamond bracelet identical to my own and a bouncing baby boy in her arms. As I show her inside, I notice her eyes grow wide as she takes in our spacious hallway, and the big squashy sofas that we all used to pile on. She glances at the silver-framed family photos and my little daughter hiding behind my skirts. She looks at me, her blue eyes serious. ‘I’m sorry’ she says. ‘I am your husband’s girlfriend. And this is his son.'
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Uh, what?
- By Karyn Cavanaugh on 02-22-23
By: K.L. Slater
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The Narrator
- By: K. L. Slater
- Narrated by: Clare Corbett, Kristin Atherton
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
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When the call came it seemed like the answer to my prayers. My career as a voice actor had been over for months and me and my little girl Scarlet were living back at my mum’s place. I felt like a failure professionally—and with Scarlet having problems at school, as a parent as well. So, when I was asked to narrate a new book by disappeared novelist Philippa Roberts I jumped at the chance, even if it meant leaving Scarlet with my ex, Hugo, for a few weeks. Hugo, with his perfect new home and his perfect new girlfriend Saskia. But this isn’t a dream come true. It’s a nightmare.
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Love but it's a production issue!
- By Mary on 09-02-22
By: K. L. Slater
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Treasure Island
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- By: Robert Louis Stevenson, Marty Ross - adaptation
- Narrated by: Philip Glenister, Daniel Mays, Catherine Tate, and others
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Audible Originals takes to the high seas to bring to life this timeless tale of pirates, lost treasure maps and mutiny. When weathered old sailor Billy Bones arrives at the inn of young Jim Hawkins' parents, it is the start of an adventure beyond anything he could have imagined. When Bones dies mysteriously, Jim stumbles across a map of a mysterious island in his sea chest, where X marks the spot of a stash of buried pirate gold.
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A reflective adventure
- By Tad Davis on 09-12-17
By: Robert Louis Stevenson, and others
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Before marrying, Emma Bovary believed she would enter a life of luxury and passion like the sentimental stories she'd read in her novels and magazines. Now married to an ordinary country doctor her life is not the romantic ideal she imagined and seeks an escape through having extra-marital affairs. This devastating spiral into deceit and despair leads to catastrophic consequences. Emma Bovary continues to be enjoyed to this day because of its profound humanity, still as fresh today as when it was first written.
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Issue de la bourgeoisie, Emma Bovary est élevée dans un couvent, où elle fera son "éducation sentimentale" en lisant les œuvres romantiques à la mode. Son mari, Charles Bovary, ne ressemble en rien aux amants mystérieux et délicats de ses lectures : c'est un officier de santé qui exerce dans un village normand où Emma, confrontée à la réalité de la vie quotidienne, va peu à peu perdre pied.
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One of Jane Austen's most popular novels. Arrogant, self-willed, and egotistical, Emma is her most unusual heroine.
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Wonderful listen
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Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, Emma is not content to be the mere dutiful wife of a French country doctor. She believes she was meant for something more—a life of luxury, leisure, and, above all, true and passionate love. She spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and throws herself headlong into a reckless series of doomed affairs. Soon heartbroken and crippled by debts, she takes drastic action, with tragic consequences for her husband and daughter.
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Awesome
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One of my favorite authors
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Improve Your French by Reading Madame Bovary: Part 1 (French Edition)
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Improve your French while listening to and appreciating the wisdom of the great French writer Gustave Flaubert. You can adjust the speed depending on your level in French. You can also buy the book to follow with the transcription as you are listening. The literature has been adapted into useful French words and verb tenses for conversation. With this book, you can improve your French progressively with natural fun, focus, and motivation. Indeed, Madame Bovary is a really interesting book!
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When young orphan, Oliver Twist, is sold into an apprenticeship with an undertaker, he leaves behind years of miserable servitude and mistreatment at an English workhouse. Hoping to move on to better things, he decides to escape his new, equally dreary surroundings and head to London. It is there that the novel unravels as Oliver meets a host of larger-than-life characters, including The Artful Dodger, a high-ranking member of a juvenile pickpocketing gang, and their elderly leader, Fagin.
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Narration
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Milly Theale is a young, beautiful, and fabulously wealthy American. When she arrives in London and meets the equally beautiful but impoverished Kate Croy, they form an intimate friendship. But nothing is as it seems: materialism, romance, self-delusion, and ultimately fatal illness insidiously contaminate the glamorous social whirl.
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Not an easy read but SO worth it!
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Frankenstein
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A terrifying vision of scientific progress without moral limits, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein leads the listener on an unsettling journey from the sublime beauty of the Swiss alps to the desolate waste of the arctic circle. Obsessed with the idea of creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material with which to fashion a new being, shocking his creation to life with electricity. But this botched creature, rejected by its creator and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy Frankenstein and all that he holds dear.
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Absolutely loved this book!
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What listeners say about Madame Bovary
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Dixie J. Singer
- 08-17-15
EXCELLENT!
This was a wonderful read. I will seek more books by Gustave Flaubert! It is a vacation into another world and another time.
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3 people found this helpful
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- KathrynVB
- 09-17-15
Wonderful classic story, well told
The story takes a long time to set up. I almost gave up at the halfway point. However, when the action begins it is a roller coaster to the end. Juliette Stevenson is excellent, as usual.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Tom Barreiros
- 03-12-18
A profoundly moving book on the nature of Happines
I loved this book. One of the classics. Juliet Stevenson does a phenomenal job with the reading and narration. The book's main theme is a Meditation on the fleeting happiness that come from the world and positions therein. It takes awhile to finish,but stick with it. Its got great payoff.
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- Diane
- 10-29-19
A little Dickens-ish
Of course Juliet could read the dictionary & make it interesting. The symbolism and overindulgent wasteland of the characters is more depressing than I remembered. What an in your face cautionary tale. Sort of have a love/hate relationship w the story.
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- William
- 05-04-22
Flaubert is an iconoclast
For those who left a negative review of this literary masterpiece it may be that the content of this story has gone over your heads. This is a realistic “romantic” novel, or one that intentionally shatters the romantic and idealistic traditions, characters, settings, and all manner of plot of the romantic movement in order to expose their essential unreality. For those who cry how this book is mundane, yes. It is mundane. And therein lies its excellence. (Pay attention to these juxtapositions.) It also exposes bare the arrogance and snobbery of a thoroughly conceited, ungrateful, self-absorbed, although brainwashed and misguided, woman who is infatuated with her literary fantasies.
What makes this tale so tragic? It probably is an accurate reflection of the hubris and vanity of the age in which Flaubert lived, honest enough to call the law down on his head.
Stevenson is a superb narrator. Absolutely stellar.
Several parts of this novel are very amusing, especially the interactions between the chemist and the priest.
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- Anonymous User
- 07-06-19
Flaubert Brings You Into the Novel
Flaubert has that gift of writing that takes you into the novel. He and Tolstoy are the best at it. This is one of the best books I've ever listened to. The narrator is excellent and is a perfect fit for the book. I may listen to it again.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Kelly
- 10-25-19
unlikable characters who still inspire sympathy
Rating this one is hard -- I was leaning toward 5 stars for several days, but when I think of some of my other 5 star reads this one comes in slightly lower. So there you go: 4+ stars.
This book really made me think about some things that I didn't expect to think about. Flaubert's Emma is unique. She is not often likable. She is flighty, selfish, proud and even arrogant. But in my interpretation of the story she seems to have issues with Depression and maybe Postpartum Depression. And, I feel like Emma was in a tight little box due to societal constraints. She struggles so violently that she injures herself. Emma's extramarital affairs must have made this book a sensational and shocking story.
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- Bloo
- 07-08-14
An interesting take on morality
Where does Madame Bovary rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
Fairly high. I liked the performance, and while I hated the heroine, the story was good.
What did you like best about this story?
When Emma suffers for what she has done. I didn't like her much.
What does Juliet Stevenson bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
I liked her inflections for the various characters. It brought things to life. Also, I am terrible at imagining French pronunciations!
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
I may or may not have hissed "YESSSS!" when she was indicted.
Any additional comments?
Does disliking Emma make me a bad feminist?
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29 people found this helpful
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- Joe Kraus
- 05-22-16
News Flash: A Masterpiece
What does Juliet Stevenson bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Gorgeous voice. There are a couple of minor editing mistakes in this audio version -- two or three times we'd have a sentence repeated -- but she brings a combination of elegance and clarity that really adds to the experience.
Any additional comments?
I think I thought I’d read Bovary a long time ago. That’s probably because I have read Anna Karenina (and to a lesser extent Chekhov’s “Lady with a Dog”), the other great adulterous novel of the mid-19th century, and I have also read Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart” (in French, no less, thank you Madames Nichols et Bork). It’s also because it’s so entwined in other literature and art that you feel you know it already. It casts the kind of light that makes you think you’ve spent more direct time on it than you have.
So, news flash: this is really good. Flaubert has the gift of the great sentence (even in translation) that he’s famous for. He’ll find the perfect detail or the perfect metaphor. Or, other times, he’ll find the perfect sentence to sum up reveries of one sort or another, and often that sentence will turn what’s come before it on its head.
If Tolstoy is the great Romantic, celebrating the passion that drives Anna’s unhappiness forward, then Flaubert is already a Modernist, someone as intrigued by irony as by the subject before him. That’s true with many of those staggering sentences, of course (he’s like a master painter with brush strokes that speak a consistent language apart from and yet constituting the work as a whole) but it’s also true of his view of Emma. I’d always assumed that we’d be called to root for Emma, that she would be (as Anna in many ways is) a proto-feminist figure whose unhappiness demonstrates the need to reimagine the role of women in society. I think it’s possible to read this that way, but I’m not convinced Flaubert was polemicizing. (And Tolstoy, great as he was, generally was polemicizing about something.)
Instead, I think we are often supposed to judge Emma. I think we are supposed to see her as self-centered and, to take an old-fashioned word then current, immoral. She is scandalous, and she leaves destruction in her wake. Flaubert seems unafraid of her sexuality – there’s great passion here, and it’s fun to imagine the good people of the 1860s and 1870s shocked by its explicit scenes – but he’s also unafraid to judge it. Sure, Charles is a dope, a mediocrity who can’t match her beauty or her intelligence, but we seem to be told here that everything would have turned out all right if only she’d managed to make herself satisfied with what she had. She had the materials for happiness before her, but she had to keep pushing, had to grab for more than was her allotted share.
Anyway, I have almost nothing original to say about this, but then I doubt I’d have anything original to say about visiting the Louvre, something I still hope to do some day. In each case, we’re talking about masterpieces, so there’s nothing wrong with just standing before them, mouth slightly agape, and admiring what’s there.
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17 people found this helpful
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- AR
- 05-01-20
A novel far ahead of its time. Story of discontent, passion and tragedy
Beautifully written by French writer Gustave Flaubert in mid 19th century. The main character Emma lives beyond her means in order to escape the fullness of rural life.
When this novel was published in 1856, it was attacked by public prosecutors for its “obscenity”. There was a trial and Flaubert was eventually acquitted. This made this a best seller. Not an average sordid affair story as it’s brutal and seems a true story of the time. Must read!!
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