City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

Madame Bovary of the suburbs, Sophie Divry ; translated from the French by Alison Anderson

eng

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novels

Madame Bovary of the suburbs

Sophie Divry ; translated from the French by Alison Anderson

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 house-cleaning, motherhood and various hobbies - each one abandoned faster than the last. But no matter what she does, her life remains unfocussed and unfulfilled. Sophie Divry dramatises the philosophical conflict between freedom and comfort that marks women's lives in a materialistic world