DISCOVERIES

Madame Bovary

A Novel

Gustave Flaubert

Translated from the French

by Margaret Mauldon

Oxford University Press:

330 pp., $27

Who can resist the charms of Emma Bovary? Each translation of Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece offers new insights on the culture, the context and the era. To fall in love with Madame Bovary is easy; to understand how her world helped create and destroy her is harder. For this, we need a translator who not only understands the France of 1857 (when the novel was first published) but also can convey agricultural and pharmaceutical terms along with myriad political, literary and social asides of her universe. Born a farm girl, Emma was a social climber. To feel that moment of indecision at a grand home when ladies place gloves in their wine glasses to indicate they will not drink, when she thinks should she or shouldn’t she, is to experience another drop of tension, of poison in the bloodstream that contributes to her final meteoric explosion. Similarly, translator Margaret Mauldon’s medical terminology (Charles Bovary was a small-town doctor) helps us understand how rapidly their world was changing. Poor man, he thinks he has saved a man he has actually killed. His failure at medicine makes Emma hate him all the more. And as Emma is seduced for the first time by the nefarious Rodolphe at a small-town fair, announcers call out the winners of prizes for porcine breeding. The novel’s cadence remains the same, with its terrible building of pressure as Emma flings herself against a version of the glass ceiling. But it is still unbearable to watch her destroy herself.

Logic

A Novel

Olympia Vernon

Grove Press: 254 pp., $22

“LOGIC” is a novel written in the language of broken things and wounded animals, of robots and grotesque dolls in Mississippi’s Valsin County -- hell on earth. David and Too Harris have a little girl named Logic. She has butterflies in her stomach, put there by her father, who repeatedly rapes her. He is an evil thing, also broken. “His body had a loose circuit in it, and it was about to ignite.” Logic has a life-sized doll, Celesta, whose mouth she staples shut. Across the street, a prostitute and her children are abused and abuse each other. The eldest, named “the tallest,” likes to wear his mother’s clothing in what he calls “the circus of me.” He and Logic are friends. Logic’s mother, a midwife, goes each day to work. “Grown-ups always wanted to know where the blade of their consciousness could be measured,” thinks Logic, who may be powerless but still knows things. Olympia Vernon writes like the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, in her own language that for some terrible reason is easy to learn.

An Ornithologist’s

Guide to Life

Stories

Ann Hood

W.W. Norton: 238 pp., $23.95

IT is not better or worse, but more relaxing, to be in the hands of a writer who has lived a few decades (say, at least four) and through a few traumas of her own. The precipices aren’t as drastic and steep; the characters often are deeper, more regular, less flashy. They eat fettuccini Alfredo, wear mauve pantsuits, get addicted to alcohol. In Ann Hood’s stories, they aren’t trying to be anything special and don’t think a whole lot about themselves. That’s not to say things don’t happen to them: She falls for a minister; she is visited by her grandson, whose girlfriend is having a baby he’ll never see; she is visited by a suicidal niece; he is visited by his mother, who does not know he is gay; she kills a boyfriend in an accidental car crash. These are folks who, like the rest of us, often fail to think things through. There are unwanted pregnancies, festering lies and suffering children. Life goes on. “The only thing left to do,” thinks one character, “is to stick it out.” “It is as if she is falling,” thinks another in a different story. “Like the game she played as a child where you fall backward, hoping someone will be there to catch you.”