Emma Bovary, the housewife doomed by fantasies of a better life, struck the young Davis as a weak heroine, and Flaubert’s allegedly revolutionary realism-the prose style that launched Proust, Joyce, Stein, Kafka, Faulkner, and Conrad on their adventures in twentieth-century consciousness-seemed unremarkable. All she knows is that she was unimpressed. Davis, who is now 63, hadn’t read Bovary since her first encounter with the book, in English, as a young woman-she can’t remember exactly when she read it, or even which translation. She had recently finished the massive job of translating Proust’s Swann’s Way-the first entirely new version in 80 years, and one that was widely celebrated as an improvement-and she was eager to focus again on her own creative work: the stream of meticulously unorthodox short fiction that culminated, last year, in the publication of the 733-page Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. When Viking asked Lydia Davis to translate Madame Bovary, back in 2006, she said no. Davis in her upstate office, where she keeps many copies of Madame Bovary and almost as many well-worn dictionaries.
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