Word: novels
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Some people feel as if they are living in a novel, but rarely does a novel feel as if it is living in a novel. Yet, such is the case with Posy Simmonds' "Gemma Bovery" (Pantheon, 106 pages, $20), a graphic novel that freely adapts Flaubert's classic "Madam Bovary" by updating the tragic narrative and making its near-namesake heroine quite aware of the parallels between her own "life" and that of "Madame Bovary." The resulting satire offers a fresh approach both to modern mores and to graphic literature...
...beginning - we knew she was going to die, after all, but as soon as that? - immediately establishes the author's playful post-modernism. "Gemma" completely avoids the pitfalls of being too close to the original text or too blithely ironic or too coyly obtuse. Instead it uses the original novel as a key plot point. The narrator of "Gemma Bovery," a French intellectual-turned-baker in a small Normandy village, becomes convinced that Gemma, an English expatriate, has been cursed to follow the course of Emma Bovary's sad life. At one point he sends her pages of the book...
Just as the power of Flaubert's original novel comes from the author's almost clinically objectivist approach, the humor of "Gemma" springs from Simmonds' dead-on observation. Thanks to the use of Gemma's diaries as part of the narrative, "Gemma Bovery" often feels like a caustic and richly deserved counterpoint to the irritating Bridget Jones franchise. Imagine Bridget on amphetamines and you have a fair idea of Gemma Bovery. The characterizations of Gemma as a rudderless yuppie, Charlie as the befuddled schlub, various French and English twits and even Joubert, the largely sympathetic baker/narrator are all razor sharp...
...world of comix. Cartoonists tend to succumb to the genre's temptations of broad, easy caricature. Posy Simmonds avoids this with her particularly English dry wit. Rich with memorable characters, literary depth, cutting humor and pictorial panache, "Gemma Bovery" sets a new standard for intelligent cartoon satire in graphic novel format...
...Christopher John Farley is a senior editor at TIME. Farley's novel about 18th century Jamaica, "Kingston by Starlight", will be published by Crown/Three Rivers Press in June. He is currently working on a biography of Bob Marley for Amistad/HarperCollins...