Word: flaubert
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...FLAUBERT'S ARTISTIC rested on his well-known statement the "author in his book must be like God in his universe, everywhere present and nowhere visible." All of his efforts to refine himself out of existence would prove, on the surface, futile, however: his desire for incorporeality, that the "artist must manage to make believe that he never existed," is never quite achieved in any of his fiction and completely betrayed by his published correspondence. Flaubert's letters, in which profound statements on art and deeply personal confessions coexist with mordant wit and bloodcurdling obscenity, constitute as full a self...
...middle ground between life (with a small l) and Art (with a capital A) is slippery at best, and the debate about their relationship remains a moot point on which many commentators have impaled themselves. In Floubert's Parrot. Julian Barnes winds thin strips of fact and interpretation around Flaubert like gauze bandage in an attempt to fix a rough outline, a makeshift profile--to make the Invisible Man of letters visible...
...several chapters, Flaubert is of secondary interest. Braithwaite, it seems, has some sharp opinions that might well be held by a novelist or some other talented fellow connected to the literary-scholarly axis. What about the fashionable practice of providing two endings for a novel, as John Fowles did in The French Lieutenant's Woman? "If novelists truly wanted to simulate the delta of life's possibilities, this is what they'd do," instructs Braithwaite. "At the back of the book would be a set of sealed envelopes in various colours. Each would be clearly marked on the outside: Traditional...
...most ferocious scorn is reserved not for novelists but for scholars. A brilliant set-piece chapter called "Emma Bovary's Eyes" takes on the late Enid Starkie, Oxford don and Flaubert biographer, who disparaged the novelist for coloring his heroine's eyes in three different hues. When the relevant passages are cited, there is no real contradiction; what Flaubert was describing was the effect of emotions on the face. Scholarly critics, fumes Braithwaite, regard the most sublime creative geniuses as "some tedious old aunt in a rocking chair who . . . was only interested in the past, and hadn't said anything...
...Flaubert's aunt, perhaps, instead of his parrot. The cheeky little irony is typical of Barnes. Brought up around London, he is the child of two French teachers, and he read French at Oxford. At 39, he has published two previous novels and held some Establishment literary jobs, including ones at the New Statesman and the Sunday Times. At the moment, he writes television criticism for the Observer. Under a pen name, Dan Kavanagh, he has produced two mysteries about a low-life London ex-policeman. They read fast and gamy, and --rare for a learned man who takes...