Stephen's Friend Comments

I'm reading Madame Bovary - which I read so long ago that it feels very much like a first-time read. Maybe I never read it, but that's hard to believe. I appreciate Flaubert's essentially starting realism, and I am intrigued by the contrast between Madame;s opinion of her marriage and her husband's. But I've been waiting a very long time for the big event, and the piling on of what seems to me to be unnecessary description engenders some snoozing, This is really a comment on a narrative pace that was acceptable when novels had so much less competition for attention than they do now.