What can I say about Madame Bovary? I read it in French this summer to redeem myself for not having read it in French class years ago (I got impatient and read the translation). I am glad I did, even though I think I still missed a lot and could use another go-around to feel I've really taken it in in the original language. 

I can see why it is a great novel -- innovative in literary technique for the time, full of powerful imagery, masterful at indirect expression -- but I can't say I enjoyed it. 

Emma is a morally empty person, not because she has affairs and desires something more from life, but because she takes no responsibility for the suffering she causes others. Her treatment of her child as an object -- to be used as a prop when it suits her, ignored when not, or even hated --  is reprehensible. The incident in which she pushes her husband to operate on a boy with a club foot out of ambition, and then blames Charles entirely for the disastrous outcome, adding to her disgust for him, was truly verging on evil. Charles is a fool, but Emma is inhuman. 

Flaubert's realistic treatment of her decline and fall is tremendously detailed, and yet we never understand why she is this way, what in her background caused her to develop so. "It was fate," Charles says at the end, but surely there is more to it than that. Some more psychological insight would have been welcome.

A pessimistic view of a spiritually impoverished world, of characters without hearts, except for Charles, who ends up actually dying of a broken heart at the end.