Customer Reviews

Flaubert's Parrot

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Julian Barnes's novel/fictional biography/fictional autobiography, "Flaubert's Parrot" is a magnificent work. This is the first of Barnes's work that I have read, and it shall not be the last. In it, an admittedly mediocre, aging scholar, Geoffrey Braithwaite, professedly attempts to eschew the accepted notions of literary biography, while pursuing just the sort of minutiae he derides. In the case of Flaubert, Braithwaite becomes obsessed with two stuffed parrots - which is the one that inspired and annoyed Flaubert during the composition of 'Un coeur simple'?

Conventions of narrative, style, and form are dispensed with throughout this work - it is composed of a range of genres (mulit-voiced narratives, chronology, encyclopedia/dictionary, and even essay-exam questions). At the same time, the disparate modes are held together from the beginning by a deeper underlying drive - the uncovering of Flaubert's life and opinions operate as a function of Braithwaite's own unresolved issues with the death of his wife.

For all the Sartre-bashing that goes on in "Flaubert's Parrot," one notices striking resonances between Barnes's novel and one of Sartre's, to wit, "Nausea." In both, exasperated scholars find themselves feebly attempting to write intended biographies (for Sartre, the subject is Monsieur de Rollebon) while exploring their own relationship turmoils. Is this part of the much-discussed 'irony' that Braithwaite emphasizes as present in Flaubert's life and writings? Is Barnes, as the deus in absentia author, manipulating and ironizing Braithwaite's tumultuous search for truth about Flaubert to point out Braithwaite's own inconsistencies?

I digress. Braithwaite tackles Flaubert's life unconventionally - Flaubert is allowed to speak for himself through quotations from correspondence and novels; Flaubert's associates, mainly Maxime du Camp, and his primary lover, Louise Colet are allowed to give 'their own' accounts of their relationships with Flaubert. Braithwaite also presents the commonplaces of Flaubert biography and criticism. All of this is presented to give the reader a highly-biased while simultaneously distancing and impartial look at Flaubert, at Braithwaite, at Barnes, at history, at story, at art, at life, and at themselves.

The layering of texts gives a seemingly random assortment of information subtle, even insidious coherence. Quotes, citations, and scenarios are repeated at intervals and in different contexts, allowing the reader to flesh out the importance of each without being repetitive or monotonous. Such is also the case with motifs and images - the bear, the parrot, train-travel, time, medicine, and metafiction. Each device overlaps the other until you find yourself caught up in the significance of every line to the life of Flaubert, to the life and writing of Braithwaite, and to the author Barnes.

At times moving, at others repellent, still at others transfixing, Barnes stocks a wealth of knowledge and speculation about art and life into 190 highly entertaining pages. I don't know how much the reader learns about Flaubert, but the careful and attentive reader will learn quite a lot about something from "Flaubert's Parrot."

This is not the book that landed The Booker Prize for Mr. Barnes. I have read the novel that did win, "England, England", and I feel this is every bit as good. There are some familiar variants on phrases he has used before, and while not entirely new are not boringly repetitive. I also enjoyed the abrupt changes in point of view, a perspective change that altered the cadence of the novel.

Mr. Barnes has truly assembled this work as opposed to progressing from one chapter to the next. The first clever use of this is when you come upon a Chronology of Flaubert's life. Nothing-unusual here. However Mr. Julian Barnes is anything but another quick wit with a pen. So the reader is treated to 3 distinct Chronologies, the subject is essentially the same, however the only true commonality is on the date they end. The voice they are written in changes, and with this modification the mood as well.

We have a Narrator who loosely guides us through the tale, however a range of stylistic changes intrudes upon his narrative. Intrude is probably too strong a word for it all works, it all makes sense when placed in the complete context of the book. For one example, I cannot remember the last time I read a novel and found myself subjected to a test, complete with parameters, what is not acceptable regarding the form of answer, and finally a time limit. It did cause uncomfortable suppressed memories of literature exams, but the unpleasant moment is blessedly short. It will depend on how fond you were of written tests.

The Parrot is much more than a bird, and even when it does appear as an ornithologist would describe the creature, the number varies widely, as do the locations and clues to the one true bird. Throughout the balance of the book the word Parrot and the countless variations of language are not only extremely clever, they show the range of this man's grasp on language, his, and many others. This could have been a vacuous display of the use of a thesaurus, but Mr. Barnes does not use various words as decoration, he uses them because they are precisely what he needs.

There has only been one book that I would not recommend starting with, and that is "Metroland". This book is as good as any of the 6 or 7 I have read, and so far is one of the top 2. So start where you may, odds are this man's work will delight.

In 1876, writing his last completed novel, Flaubert borrows a stuffed parrot from the Museum of Rouen to grace his desk. The parrot figures in "A Simple Heart," but its glowering presence soon irritates him and he sends it back. Today, there are two stuffed parrots in Rouen, each claimed to be the one. So begins Julian Barnes' extended riff on his favorite French author. The very promising spine of this narrative is a detective story about undiscovered letters between Flaubert and his English mistress, involving a Pnin-like academic worthy of Nabokov. But Barnes drops this ball after only two brief segments, and for the rest of his book offers a miscellany for Flaubert buffs: trivia, chronologies, riffs on obscure text points--the content of any famous-author website. In the end, as with the parrot, this reader said: so what? The result is anemic and precious, not compelling or illuminating, and has been greatly over-praised.

For a better sense of Barnes' caliber within this new collage genre, compare it with "Was" by Geoff Ryman, a lesser-known masterpiece from 1992. Like Barnes, Ryman riffs on a famous author and his work (Frank Baum and the Oz books) but instead of Barnes' lazy doodling, Ryman offers a stunning multi-strand tapestry filled with cinematic drama and complex characters, a book that really takes off, not once but repeatedly. In Barnes, a wan little smoke signal rises above Oxbridge; in Ryman, a fictive tornado sweeps us away.

"Flaubert's Parrot, c'est moi." (Fran Lebowitz) When someone mentions Flaubert in conversation, the first thing that usually pops into one's head is - almost inevitably - "Madame Bovary". The first thing I think of though is "Flaubert's Parrot" by Julian Barnes. It has become not uncommon for the Brits to write perceptive analysis of French authors - Alain de Botton's "How Prouste Can Change Your Life" is only a recent example. It's probably the very nature of a complicated relationship between the two countries, their often emphasized difference that bears fruit like Barnes' masterpiece: profound knowledge of the close neighbor, on one hand, and on the other, an ability to keep one's distance and stay aloof, for the purposes of estranged observation. Barnes employs both. As a result, we have a work of art that is neither English nor French, but both, in which English irony and self-scrutiy mingle with French grace and wit in a most successful combination. "Flaubert's Parrot" is also a mixture of styles, both fiction and literary criticism, diary and biography. We get to view Flaubert's life though the eyes of one Doctor Geoffrey Braithwaite who sets off to reconstruct the writer's life in order to - probably - better understand the human nature and thus to - possibly - comprehend a mystery of his own wife's suicide. In Flaubert's melancholy the protagonist finds - perhaps an illusionary - comfort, almost a feeling of shared sadness which he might fail to encounter among his contemporary friends, in case he has any. It actually seems that Gustave, as Braithwaite takes to calling the writer, is his only friend. There is an "advantage of making friends with those already dead." Both are lonely, prone to self-analysis and are mourning a loss: Flaubert, of his mother; the doctor, of his wife. A curious "animal-theory" introduced by Barnes could have become the ground for a Ph.D. study by one of those contemporary scholars who often turn to obscure topics having run out of traditional ones. Throughout his notes Flaubert compares himself to a number of animals, but "secretly, essentially, he is a Bear." It truly tells us more about his character than it might seem. We tend to see ourselves through others. Every one of us has a fluffy, flying or even creepy counterpart in the animal kingdom. Horoscopes tell us we are "aries", "pisces", "leos", "scorpios", "capricorns". Barnes plays with linguistic variations of the French word "ours" (a rough fellow, a police cell) and it's literary allusions (La Fontaine's fable). Now we have yet another image of the writer: Flaubear. But then why is the book called Flaubert's Parrot? We are to participate in yet another quest that Doctor Braithwaite undertakes: there exists a stuffed parrot which supposedly inspired Flaubert to write "Un Coer Simple", a story about a poor lonely woman and her bird.Which is also a symbol of the writer's grotesque and his other animal counterpart, according to Braithwaite. Braithwaite's notes about France where he travels in "a packed cross-Channel ferry,..a modern ship of fools" are alternated with Flaubert's about England - another hint to the "mixed background" of the book. The same with the past and present: they intervene, implicate and compliment each other, cancel and suggest each other's truths. The protagonist tries to reconstruct the past through memoirs, literature, Things which feed his imagination. Braithwaite does not find the past romantic, or better, or particularly interesting - it is merely a framework of Flaubert's creativity, an ambiance of his exitence. It simply is. Flaubert's view of his time was not much brighter than Braithwaite's of today's world. After all, OUR past was only HIS everyday present. The most fascinating and subtle interplay of the two lives is to be found in the last chapters, in which Braithwaite tells a story of his marriage and of his wife's death. The dead writer comments on it, from the past. The story is intermingled with the episodes of Flaubert's life that have to do with grief. Braithwaite's wife was unfaithful ("Madame Bovary, c'est moi"?). Through Flaubert's writing he seeks to understand the nature of her adultery. Was it simply, as Nabokov put it, "a most conventional way to rise above the conventional"? or was she merely unhappy? It strikes us that Braithwaite is a doctor, just like Charles Bovary. It does not surprise us that he does not find any solutions in the book:"Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this..." Books and dissertations might explain why Emma commited adultery and died. Nothing will explain why Ellen did. Braithwaite is left tete-a-tete with himself, like Gustave after his beloved mother's death. Braithwaite is alone, at the end of his parrot-quest, facing three identical parrots at the provincial French museum of Natural History. "Perhaps...we should prefer the consolation of non-fulfillment." Well, perhaps.

This may be the most unusual book I've ever read.

Sort of a philosophical treatise on art, writing, Flaubert, the French, compulsion and love presented under the guise of a very arcane literary detective story.

Barnes is a very quixotic and imaginative writer with a definitely skewed view of the world and an engaging and witty writing voice. The musings of the narrator are well formed and allow the reader move along at a brisk pace. It helps that Flaubert himself was a wacky and iconoclastic figure-one of those people we've all heard of but don't really know anything about unless you are some sort of 19th century French literature freak.

This was the first Barnes novel I read and it was so good I have been slowly working my way through his other books, which has proven to be an altogether delightful experience. All of his novels are good-this one stands out from the pack.

I picked up this book at a friend's recommendation. It is the first (but certainly won't be the last) book I've read by Barnes. Although the story putatively deals with an aging scholar's research into (and physical search for) Loulou, a parrot mentioned in Flaubert's "Un coeur simple," it covers much larger issues--the relationship of art and life, the dubious nature of literary legacies, the value and role of medicine, the status of women, the importance (or lack of: discuss) marital fidelity. Barnes certainly has a great love and deep knowledge of French literature, but the writing style he adopted for this novel reminds me more of James Joyce's Ulysses with each chapter employing a different literary genre while cleverly linking across chapters to other key thoughts and themes. Its comparative brevity (just over 200 pages), however, makes it easier for the (committed) reader to master and enjoy than Joyce's masterpiece. There's a lot here to explore and think about, and the more effort readers put into it the more they'll get out of it. On my first read through, I mostly enjoyed the Flaubert trivia; upon rereading I plan to pay closer attention to the doctor/scholar-narrator in order to discover more clues about his burdens, motives, and obsessions.

Although it probably helps to have read a lot of Flaubert before diving into this novel, I think the only book the reader really needs to be familiar with is "Madame Bovary."

Flaubert's Parrot is a novel, but I will concern myself with its nonfictional aspects, for I'm afraid that this book has had greater popular appeal than any full-length biography of Flaubert. And for those who may take Barnes' book as a primary source for understanding the life of Flaubert, I give a warning. Barnes throws doubt on the possibility of any person truly knowing another,this being perhaps the deepest message of his book. But Barnes, in this process, obscures an aspect of Flaubert that towers above any other: that Flaubert was a priest of a cult of literature like few have been since and like no one before him.

Barnes is never categorical. He is witty, trivial, irreverent, and suggestive. But he does make a case against the image of Flaubert as the hermit of Croisset, hidden from the world, inaccessible in his study as he pored over books and manuscripts. Flaubert saw friends frequently. He traveled widely. In 1856, he took an apartment in Paris and enjoyed the social life of some of the highest nobility and of the most famous literary personages of the day. Barnes also makes a case for Flaubert being a more passionate and sensual man than had hitherto been believed.
But Flaubert's intense friendships were all extremely literary, and his travels were above all for literary inspiration. He was a sensuous man but his only long-lasting affair, with Louise Colette, shows a man devoted to books, not women. When Louise dared to do the forbidden--come to Flaubert's home at Croisset--he turned her out without hesitation into the pouring rain, and thus the affair ended.

Milton, Dante, Virgil all felt their poetry required divine inspiration, long years of preparation in study, long years of work to polish each line, to reconsider each phrase. But no one, before Flaubert, felt that prose fiction was worthy of such devotion. Flaubert spent six to seven years writing each of his novels, and these were years of long, daily work. The 300 pages of Madame Bovary were refined down from 4000 pages of notes and revisions. Flaubert read 1500 books and pamphlets in order to write Bouvard and Pecuchet, where he ridicules pompous erudition. Since Flaubert, we have had such worshipers of this cult as Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka. For all of these writers, Flaubert was an inspiration.

You have to have read Madame Bovary (or maybe Cliff's notes on Madame Bovary) to understand the plot. You don't have to have read "Un Coeur Simple" but you probably will after reading this. It's not until three-quarters of the way through that you suddenly realize there's a plot. Until then it's a series of very clever biographical essays about Flaubert. Then you understand why the narrator it obsessed with Flaubert. Then you get equally clever essays about the nature of love and grief. Wonderful insight into the poignancy of bereavement combined with sharp and erudite wit. It may be too erudite and clever for some. It demands a certain amount of francophilia and anglophilia, and understanding phrases like "I might let the TLS have it." I'd always thought it was Nabokov, not Starkie who accused Flaubert of getting mixed up about the color of Emma's eyes. I think he did get get mixed up about the color of Loulou's wings in Un Coeur Simple- at least in the English translation I read.

This is a book which some notable authors praise (Graham Greene and John Fowles for example) but I did not enjoy due to its constant references to the reader especially about writing. For example Barnes writes: "The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all." The result was a smorgasbord of thoughts and ideas often bland and unpalatable. True, there were scattered within some wonderful snippets such as Barnes' rant about the late Dr Enid Starkie, Reader Emeritus in French Literature at the University of Oxford. It was when Barnes wrote about Flaubert's character and life that the novel picked up but when the narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, came to the fore, ennui set in. Barnes had obviously done considerable research into Flaubert's life but if you are looking for an enjoyable literary read, I suggest read Madame Bovary and leave Flaubert's Parrot on the shelf.

Julian Barnes is a fine writer and talented translator (from French to English). In Flaubert's Parrot, a slim volume that is nonetheless quite richly seeded, Barnes employs a number of narrative devices including running commentaries, as it were, by Flaubert himself and various cronies, and an actual narrator in the form of Dr. Geoffrey Braithwaite. Unfortunately, the good doctor is a royal pain in the arse, and it is difficult to see what really useful purpose he serves by continually forcing himself upon the reader, as is his wont. In fact, this is a case, at times, of severe narratorial (sic) intrusion, and at its worst, it is most tedious, most tedious indeed.

This, then, is a work which often aspires to something like the greatness of the writer whose life is central to its literary plan, but continually runs out of puff since Dr. Braithwaite, one of the most boring characters you could ever hope to meet, insists on getting his prattle in every now again. I enjoyed large sections of this book; however, in spite of its slimness, in the end, I was unable to finish it.