Industry | 2010.08.29
Who's in between the covers of Playboy now? Madame Bovary
Playboy features an extract from a new translation of Flaubert\'s classic
Given that he was a notorious onanist, it\'s a fair bet that Gustave Flaubert, were he alive today, would be an avid consumer of porn. It is therefore not entirely unfitting that an extract from the Frenchman\'s most famous work, Madame Bovary , graces the pages of the latest issue of Playboy .
What has prompted the magazine to honour what it describes as "the most scandalous novel of all time"? Its somewhat esoteric reason – given the kind of magazine it is – is that a new translation of Flaubert\'s masterwork is about to be published, by the American short story writer and Proust translator Lydia Davis.
In the books world, of course, a new translation of a major work of literature is big news. And the excitement is all the greater because Davis – known for writing stories that are sometimes no more than a sentence long – is one of America\'s most feted writers. All the same, it\'s a bit odd to see the Bovary extract flagged up on Playboy \'s cover, in among the promise of nude pictures of Kelly Brook ("The UK\'s hottest export") and "A history of Playboy pads".
Odd, perhaps, but not unprecedented, because in its 57-year history, Playboy has proved quite the champion of serious writing, publishing stories by a huge number of top writers, from Saul Bellow and John Cheever to Roald Dahl and Nadine Gordimer.
Always a favourite with Vladimir Nabokov, it last year ran the first extract of his unfinished final novel, The Original of Laura , and earlier this year ran an excerpt from Martin Amis\'s The Pregnant Widow .
Its latest excerpt is from the second part of Bovary , when Emma is taken riding by the rakish Rodolphe, a scene that leads to her straying for the first time.
It\'s pretty tame stuff by the standards of today, but readers will no doubt relish the suggestiveness of sentences like the following – and illustrated with a drawing of a naked lady on a saddle, flying through the air: "With her face tilted down a little, she abandoned herself to the cadence of the motion that rocked her in the saddle."
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/a[...]gustave-flaubert-madame-bovary
