Charles Bovary, Country Doctor Portrait of a Simple Man

Fans of Flaubert's Madame Bovary will want to read this reimagination of one of literature's most famous failures, Charles Bovary. Part fiction, part philosophy, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor is also a book about love.

Charles Bovary, Country Doctor is one of the most unusual projects in twentieth-century literature: a novel-essay devoted to salvaging poor bungler Charles Bovary, the pathetic, laughable, cuckolded husband of Madame Bovary and the heartless creation of Gustave Flaubert. As a once-promising novelist who was tortured by the Nazis and survived a year in Auschwitz, author Jean Améry had a particular sympathy for the lived experience of vulnerability, affliction, and suffering, and in this book—available in English for the first time—he asserts the moral claims of Dr. Bovary. What results is a moving paean to the humanity of Charles Bovary and to the supreme value of love.

Jean Améry (1912–1978) was born Hans Meier in Vienna, Austria. He was a philosophy and literature student in Vienna and participated in the resistance against the Nazi occupation of Belgium. He was detained and imprisoned for several years in concentration camps, surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald and finally Bergen-Belsen, until he was liberated in 1945. He settled in Belgium after the war and wrote several renowned works, including At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (1966), On Aging (1968), and On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death (1976).

Adrian Nathan West is a literary translator and author of The Aesthetics of Degradation. His translations include Pere Gimferrer’s Fortuny, Rainald Goetz’s Insane, and Juan Benet’s Construction of the Tower of Babel. His criticism has appeared in The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, and many other journals in print and online.