Madame Bovary of the Suburbs

The story of a woman's life, from childhood to death, somewhere in provincial France, from the 1950s to just shy of 2025. She has doting parents, does well at school, finds a loving husband after one abortive attempt at passion, buys a big house with a moonlit terrace, makes decent money, has children, changes jobs, retires, grows old and dies. All in the comfort that the middle classes have grown accustomed to. But she's bored.

She takes up all sorts of outlets to try to make something happen in her life: adultery, charity work, esotericism, manic housecleaning, motherhood and various hobbies - each one abandoned faster than the last. But no matter what she does, her life remains unfocused and unfulfilled. Nothing truly satisfies her because deep down - just like the town where she lives - the landscape is nondescript, flat, horizontal.

Sophie Divry dramatises the philosophical conflict between freedom and comfort that marks women's lives in a materialistic world. Our heroine is an endearing, contemporary Emma Bovary, and Divry's prose will remind listeners of the best of Houellebecq, the cold, implacable historian who paints a precise portrait of an era and those who inhabit it - and in doing so renders existence indelibly absurd.

Translated from the French by Alison Anderson.


Genre: General Fiction