Madame Bovary of the Suburbs

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