Word: flaubert
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...much brain power, was Pure Word. If you were a French academic, you might say he was symbole de Logos. Being English, I hasten back to the corporeal: to that svelte, perky creature I had seen at the Hotel-Dieu. I imagined Loulou sitting on the other side of Flaubert's desk and staring back at him like some taunting reflection from a funfair mirror. No wonder three weeks of its parodic presence caused irritation. Is the writer much more than a sophisticated parrot...
...novel crosscuts between Braithwaite's monologues and the fruit of his scholarly pursuits. "The Flaubert Bestiary" traces various animal metaphors and ancedotes in Flaubert's correspondence. "Emma Bovary's Eyes" uses that topic as a jumping-off point for a spirited polemic against various schools of Flaubert criticism. "Louise Colet's Version" is an imaginary reconstruction of the opinions of Louise Colet, to whom Flaubert wrote his greatest love letters, but whose replies are unfortunately lost forever. In "Braithwalie's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas," he indulges in a latter-day variant of Flaubert's favorite sport, bourgeois-bashing...
Braithwaite's hot pursuit of Flaubert trivia is the scholarly equivalent of a lover singing the praises of his beloved's toes, but it's also a statement about the ultimate futility of biography on a large scale. The second chapter, entitled "Chronology," gives a Rashomon-like series of perspectives on Flaubert's lifeline, all strictly factual and yet entirely contradictory. Once the big picture is safely relegated to the dusty attic of preceding scholarship, Braithwaite gives us his Flaubert--thin slices through the tissue of the writer's life along various thematic points. We can never know everything about...
...course, there's more to the novel than scaling the heights of Braithwaite's brow in pursuit of Flaubert. At the heart of Braithwaite's literary musings lies an attempt to come to terms with his own life, his failed marriage, and the death of his wife. The issue of the relation between Flaubert's life and art gradually dovetails into the narrator's biography. His attempts to understand are shot through with melancholy, as the past remains elusive: "My wife: someone I feel I understand less well than a foreign writer dead for a hundred years. Is this...
...broader way, Flaubert's Parrot also reflects the strange relationship with French culture that the British have always had, a profound--and mostly unreciprocated--appreciation existing under the shadow of centuries-old contempt and mistrust. (It's no mistake that France 1848-1945. The best and most comprehensive book on French culture, should have been written by an Oxford professor, Theodore Zeldin.) Braithwalie is a Gallophile as only an Englishman can be, revelling in the wine-tasting, the pharmacies, the road signs, the myriad facets of everyday, life with a delight unmediated by the ever-present chauvinism of the French...