Charles Bovary, Country Doctor

“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

“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, The Wall Street Journal

“This strange but compelling book is at once a passionate critique and courageous reimagining of Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece of psychological realism, Madame Bovary…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, Financial Times

“This is the first English translation of the work, which follows in the tradition of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and John Gardner’s Grendel, 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.” —Kirkus Reviews

Jean Amery (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, where he was liberated in 1945. He settled in Belgium after the war, and wrote several renowned works, including At the Mind’s Limits- Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (1966), On Aging (1968), and On Suicide- A Discourse on Voluntary Death (1976).

Nate West is the author of essays, fiction, reviews, and translations that have appeared in publications including 3-AM, McSweeney’s, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is a contributing editor to Asymptote, and his first book is The Aesthetics of Degradation.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.