"She has everything; doting parents; a loving husband; all the comforts that the middle class have grown accustomed to. But she's bored. She takes up all sorts of hobbies to try to make something happen in her life, but no matter what she does, nothing truly satisfies her, because deep down, she feels flat. Empty. Until she meets Phillippe...In Madame Bovary of the Suburbs, Sophie Divry dramatizes the philosophical conflict between freedom and comfort that marks women's lives in a materialistic world."This book has really stuck with me and is not easy to forget. Everyone wants to believe that life will turn out well. We are something unique and beautiful and our life's path will reflect that. We will accomplish something amazing. People will remember us after we are gone. We will eventually find a moment of complete contentment and satisfaction. But what if, like all to often, we are nothing out of the ordinary, accomplish nothing and feel nothing.
The book had an extremely unusual and unique narrative style which at first I wasn't sure I was going to get on with. It employs a second person narrative which I'm not entirely sure I've come across before but Divry uses it so effectively that it just fits the story beautifully. It almost seems to speak to the reader and I think this works well with the idea that the main character, M.A. shares a fate which could belong to any one of us. Her story is universal.
Never properly named, M.A. is seen growing from childhood into adulthood and traversing the various stages of life's well trodden path. She grows up longing to move away from her parents and her childhood home and embark upon a new adventure. She goes to university, she has her first boyfriend, she marries, has children and does everything that is expected of her, even while she wishes for something more. Something which she can't quite name and always seems to be just out of her reach. The circle of life is effectively portrayed as she grows older and morphs into the role that her parents once had.
Distinctly French in tone and conception, this is quirky and charming, bleak and deadly all at once. The cool narrative voice skewers her subject, an unnamed woman called just M.A. (Emma), but equally addresses us as the reader, forcing an examination of our own lives. However much we might consider ourselves different from M.A., there are places where we, surely, recognise ourselves.
There are few passages where Divry explains mundane things such as driving or washing machines as if the reader was an alien from another planet. She also occasionally gives us an in-depth look at a minor and inconsequential character. It creates a feeling of awe and disassociation. That something or someone that means nothing to you is important in its own right and is the star in their own show.
Like Flaubert's Emma Bovary, M.A. is on a search for fulfilment which is never quite reached - but whereas Flaubert's heroine in entrapped by bourgeois conceptions of gender and petty economics, M.A., in theory, has the social and cultural freedom to pursue her own goals... only to find herself following Emma's footsteps more closely than she expected. With personal happiness always dependent on something in the future or on someone else - leaving home, a good degree, falling in love, children, the perfect dinner party, a passionate love affair - M.A. moves through life always bored, always searching.
Deceptively easy to read, this is also both philosophical and deeply existentially depressing. Would definitely recommend.
Age Rating 15+ Some quite graphic sex scenes and the content needs a more mature mind to fully appreciate the themes.
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