Madame Bovary of the Suburbs

Sophie Divry

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. Nothing truly satisfies her because deep down - just like the town where she lives - the landscape is non-descript 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 readers 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

>