The blow arrived right afterward, with her elbow. That cry of irritation of a woman dragged away from her own bouleversements, like a leaf on a rainy day toward the black mouth of a manhole, made a deep impression on me. I heard clearly the voice of Madame Bovary saying, with increasing annoyance, “ Laisse-moi! Laisse-moi! Eh! Laisse-moi donc!” (“Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Won’t you leave me alone!”), and it was like the voice of my mother when she was lost in her tasks or her thoughts, and I didn’t want to leave her, I didn’t want her to leave me. I knew that I had my eyes on a page, I could see the words clearly, yet it seemed to me that I had approached my mother just as Berthe tried to approach Emma, catching hold of her par le bout, les rubans de son tablier (“the ends of her apron strings”). I certainly saw myself in Berthe Bovary, Emma and Charles’s daughter, and felt a jolt. But France remained essentially Yonville, as I discovered it one afternoon decades ago, and it seemed to me that at the same time I came upon the craft of making metaphors and upon myself.

I remember crouching inside that place-name one afternoon, when I was barely fourteen, travelling through the pages of “Madame Bovary.” Slowly, over the years, thousands of other names of cities and towns followed, some near Yonville, others far away. The central passages were originally conceived as a response to the Swedish publisher Brombergs, which, after acquiring the rights to “The Days of Abandonment,” decided not to publish it, on the ground that the behavior of Olga, the novel’s protagonist, toward her children was morally reprehensible.įrance for me-long, long before Paris-was Yonville-l’Abbaye, eight leagues from Rouen. The following essay was drawn from “Frantumaglia,” a collection of Elena Ferrante’s writings and interviews, translated by Ann Goldstein, which is out November 1st from Europa Editions. A 1905 illustration of Emma Bovary and her daughter Berthe in Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.” Composition by Alfred de Richemont.

Madame Bovary for windows instal