{"product_id":"charles-bovary-country-doctor-isbn-9781681372501","title":"Charles Bovary, Country Doctor","description":"\u003cb\u003eFans of Flaubert's \u003ci\u003eMadame Bovary \u003c\/i\u003ewill want to read this reimagination of one of literature's most famous failures, Charles Bovary. Part fiction, part philosophy, \u003ci\u003eCharles Bovary, Country Doctor\u003c\/i\u003e is also a book about love.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eCharles Bovary, Country Doctor\u003c\/i\u003e is one of the most unusual projects in twentieth-century literature: a novel-essay devoted to salvaging poor bungler Charles Bovary, the pathetic, laughable, cuckolded husband of Madame Bovary and the heartless creation of Gustave Flaubert. As a once-promising novelist who was tortured by the Nazis and survived a year in Auschwitz, author Jean Améry had a particular sympathy for the lived experience of vulnerability, affliction, and suffering, and in this book—available in English for the first time—he asserts the moral claims of Dr. Bovary. What results is a moving paean to the humanity of Charles Bovary and to the supreme value of love.\"How  lucky we are that this essay-novel of Jean Améry’s, circling around Flaubert’s tragically uxorious country doctor, poor dim Charles with his beating heart and ugly hat, is available to English readers now in a nimble translation by Adrian Nathan West. In his  half-fictional monologue, half-philosophical tract, Améry interrogates literature and realism through his obsession with this side character in not just a novel but the novel.  A meditation on failure and the loser to rival Thomas Bernhard’s.\" —Kate Zambreno\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Améry’s book, nimbly translated from the German by Adrian Nathan West, is a defense of both Charles Bovary and of the qualities that Flaubert is so keen to ridicule: moderation, decency, responsibility…there’s a satisfying feeling of delayed justice in this brief, thought-provoking book. All of us, fools that we are, should have such eloquent advocates.” —Sam Sacks, \u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"This strange but compelling book is at once a passionate critique and courageous reimagining of Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece of psychological realism, \u003ci\u003eMadame Bovary\u003c\/i\u003e...Améry’s efforts to imaginatively inhabit Flaubert’s sensibility, and the resulting critique of his mean-spirited representation of Charles, make for fascinating reading...Améry’s daringly imaginative and moving book is a provocation to rethink much of what we thought we knew about one of the most important and widely discussed works of European literature.\" —Doug Battersby, \u003ci\u003eFinancial Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"This is the first English translation of the work, which follows in the tradition of Jean Rhys' \u003ci\u003eWide Sargasso Sea\u003c\/i\u003e and John Gardner's \u003ci\u003eGrendel\u003c\/i\u003e, stand-alone novels—not prequels or sequels—approaching a prior tale from a point of view more sympathetic to a major character than that taken in the original...readers will appreciate Améry's valiant efforts to rehabilitate Charles Bovary and his conventional cohort in a work which is difficult to categorize and even harder to forget.\" —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eJean Améry \u003c\/b\u003e(1912–1978) was born Hans Meier in Vienna, Austria. He was a philosophy and literature student in Vienna and participated in the resistance against the Nazi occupation of Belgium. He was detained and imprisoned for several years in concentration camps, surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald and finally Bergen-Belsen, until he was liberated in 1945. He settled in Belgium after the war and wrote several renowned works, including \u003ci\u003eAt the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eSurvivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities \u003c\/i\u003e(1966), \u003ci\u003eOn Aging \u003c\/i\u003e(1968), and \u003ci\u003eOn Suicide: A\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eDiscourse on Voluntary Death \u003c\/i\u003e(1976).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAdrian Nathan West\u003c\/b\u003e is a literary translator and author of \u003ci\u003eThe Aesthetics of Degradation. \u003c\/i\u003eHis translations include Pere Gimferrer’s \u003ci\u003eFortuny\u003c\/i\u003e, Rainald Goetz’s \u003ci\u003eInsane\u003c\/i\u003e, and Juan Benet’s \u003ci\u003eConstruction of the Tower of Babel\u003c\/i\u003e. His criticism has appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e, and many other journals in print and online.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303843746021,"sku":"NP9781681372501","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781681372501.jpg?v=1767723569","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/charles-bovary-country-doctor-isbn-9781681372501","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}