Monday 1 December 2008

Madame Bovary 2

I'm reading Alexander McCall Smith's "Love Over Scotland" between books and came across this nugget:

"...it's so refreshing to see a male writer having a go at a truely nasty woman; male writers don't dare do that these days... You wouldn't get a modern day Flaubert punishing Madame Bovary as the real Flaubert did. Oh no. By the way, did you know that Flaubert wrote terribly slowly? He managed five words an hour, which meant that on a good day he wrote about thirty words. Now they were good words, of course, but even so..."

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