Charles Bovary, Country Doctor by Jean Améry review – the most famous literary cuckold

A timely critique and reimagining of Madame Bovary by a writer who finds Flaubert ‘filled with hatred’

The archaism “cuckold” has returned to the contemporary lexicon thanks to the combined efforts of niche pornographers and “alt‑right” trolls. Anyone who has come into contact with online misogynists, or glanced at their repartee on social media, will have noticed that the contraction “cuck” is one of their go-to insults. Epitomising male anxieties about inadequacy and impotence, it’s the kind of epithet that says an awful lot about the person using it.

The term’s reappearance makes the first English-language edition of Charles Bovary, Country Doctor, by the Austrian essayist Jean Améry (1912–1978), a timely publication. It takes as its subject the most famous literary “cuck” of all, the hapless husband of the eponymous adulterer in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857). Améry’s book is structured as a “novel-essay”, with chapters alternating between novelistic fan fiction and literary criticism. This idiosyncratic format would doubtless have vexed booksellers and librarians when it was first published in German in 1978; today we call it “creative non-fiction” and scarcely bat an eyelid.

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from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2BEkg2S

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