Flaubert's Parrot | Julian Barnes | A review of Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes

Flaubert's Parrot | Julian Barnes | Brilliant! My J Barnes Fav!

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Flaubert's Parrot

	Flaubert's Parrot Julian Barnes Vintage, 1990 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 31 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A kind of detective story, relating a cranky amateur scholar's search for the truth about Gustave Flaubert, and the obsession of this detective whose life seems to oddly mirror those of Flaubert's characters.

A review of Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes

Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes is a book I have had queuing up to read for some time. I don't know why I have never got round to reading it. Perhaps it's because of the overtly "literary" tag that was attached to it when it was short-listed for the Booker Prize. I am not against "literary" fiction. Far from it: indeed I aspire to write it, after a fashion. My avoidance of Flaubert's Parrot was never conscious, but was probably a result of thinking that I knew what to expect - word play, experimentation with form, biography, dissection of the writer's role, relationship between art and life, in fact all the mundane things that your average novelist has for breakfast. The less than average ones, by the way, always have corn flakes. It is their convention. Having just finished the book, I can declare that I found all I expected and much, much, much more.

Julian Barnes has his character, a doctor called Geoffrey Braithwaite, consider various literary ideas. One, which only really applies to writing prose fiction, is the relation between form and content. Most novels, certainly most pulp fiction, never address this, since the authors usually present apparently literal material merely literally or, perhaps even more commonly, fantastical material literally. Generally within some recognisable genre, these offerings tend to preoccupy themselves with simple narration. In effect, most novels are presented in pictorial form, like a comic strip running a frame at a time through the author's mind, with only minimally extended commentary. Their presentation is invariably linear, with the writer's aim to spoon-feed the reader with bite-sized chinks of easily digestible plot in a context aimed at simplifying the experience.

Flaubert's Parrot is the polar opposite of this. The only plot is Flaubert's life, both physical and intellectual, alongside that of his enthusiastic intended biographer, the doctor, Geoffrey. Geoffrey's research, notes, speculations and musings provide the book's utterly original form. Since the adultery of Flaubert's fictional Madam Bovary provided the scandal that created his fame, evidence of his attitudes towards women and sex in his own life provides a fascinating backdrop against which we can assess the author's motives and desires. The death and revealed adultery of the narrator's own wife provides motive for his obsession with Flaubert and his femme fatale, and, quite unexpectedly, this culminates in a truly moving moment of emotional empathy that the author, Barnes, not Flaubert, not the narrator, evokes in his reader.

This emotional intensity developed as a real surprise towards the end of the book. Through it, Julian Barnes achieves a perfect marriage of form and content, the finest I have ever encountered. No matter how much we analyse the creative process, it is our emotional lives that provide the stuff of art. The writer moulds it, contextualises it, formalises it, but eventually the rawness of the experience, the chasm of bereavement, the hollow of betrayal, the consonance of love that makes us laugh or weep as we read, and Julian Barnes provokes both responses in this beautiful book.

There are some stunning moments of virtuosity. There are, for instance, three concatenated chronologies of Flaubert's life - an encyclopedia of success, a record of failure and a personal diary. This is a masterstroke, effectively answering the rhetorical question of why we remain interested in the author, even when we consider a work as iconic as Madame Bovary. The narrator's dissection of "correctness" in fiction is utterly poignant, especially so when we cannot even agree on the detail of reality. And so what if the writer decides to change things around? Isn't it supposed to be fiction?

But the enduring memory of Flaubert's Parrot is that masterstroke of marrying motives via Falubert's real life, whatever that was, the imagined world of his femme fatale and the apparently real life of Geoffrey Braithwaite, with its own experience of adultery and bereavement. And then, of course, we have Geoffrey's obsession with Flaubert, through which we reflect on the ideas of the self and its selfishness. Stunningly beautiful.

And the parrot? Probably a fake. Or perhaps just faked. Or then again....

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Brilliant! My J Barnes Fav!

I wish I had enough of that literary critic vocabulary and style to convey how wonderfully rich FLAUBERT'S PARROT is. Then again, given how critics are taken to task in FP perhaps I'll simply say BRAVO! LOVE IT! And, of course, WOW! TOTALLY AWESOME!

I recently read MY NAME IS RED (Orhan Pamuk), fabulously fun from the "multiple point of view" perspective. Well I gotta tell ya, FP goes even further. Breathtaking.

If I had more time I'd "review" FP by selecting quote after quote. Alas, too busy. Suffice it to say, the writing is DELICIOUS!

Oh, haven't mentioned: FP is a great belly laugh too. Side splitting. Wet your pants. (Wear DEPENDS.)

Now... gotta see if this is on CD... would love to HEAR it too...

Kirtland Peterson

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Words, colors, images....and deceptions

I had a hard time getting into this book. I have not read anything by Flaubert before and thought it might prove to be a hindrance, but found that it was not.
Julian Barnes sets the stage very well, even while flitting around with the narration and once engaged, I enjoyed the novel and the quirky style more than anticipated. The novel stands on it's own quite well.
The book centers around a retired physician haunted by scholarly questions and minutiae from the novels and real life of the author, Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), especially in trying to determine which of two different parrots he visits once graced the author's desk?

The scholarly obsession with Flaubert by the good Dr. Braithwaite doesn't make much sense until the last few chapters when betrayals of love and literature slowly surface.

A favorite quote .... "Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity."

That poetry wraps around this novel so nicely.
It's all about words! .....And words deceive much as people deceive.
Why does Flaubert keep changing the color of M. Bovary's eyes? And why is Dr. Braithwaite so haunted by this revelation and other minor mysteries?
We discover that Flaubert viewed his work much differently by literal definitions and feels his entire position to have been misunderstood..... "The artistic world has become irritatingly full of schools and -isms: Realism, Naturalism, Impressionism ("A bunch of jokers who have convinced themselves, and want to convince us, that they've discovered the Mediterranean!")"

Ironically, he finds himself to be hailed as one of the founding fathers of Realism.... after having said that it was because he hated Realism so much that he wrote Madame Bovary in the first place! He also said that success, when it came, always struck for the wrong reason.
This novel definitely has you guessing at many of the references and reasons for them. But it slowly reveals them in a wonderful prose that is keenly sharp and often quite funny.

The attempts to find the real Flaubert cleverly mirror the attempts to find the real parrot he kept on his desk while writing and in the end....both prove seemingly futile.

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Another disappointed parrot

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.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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