Word: flaubert
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Almost any literary contrivance can be called a novel nowadays, so the label will do for Flaubert's Parrot. What the book turns out to be, though, is a brash, footloose ramble through the life and works of Gustave Flaubert, and it is hard to think of a work starting from such a narrow, scholarly premise that is so free of preciousness. Julian Barnes does provide one conventional feature: a narrator, in this case Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired English doctor and Flaubert amateur. He first visited Normandy, the novelist's native ground, as a soldier in 1944, and after...
...Flaubert "died little more than a hundred years ago, and all that remains of him is paper," observes Braithwaite. "Paper, ideas, phrases, metaphors, structured prose which turns into sound. This, as it happens, is precisely what he would have wanted; it's only his admirers who sentimentally complain." Braithwaite makes a doughty admirer indeed: zealous, dogged, properly crazed. His particular madeleine, his key to the past, is a stuffed green parrot he discovers in a Flaubert museum in Rouen. The author borrowed a stuffed bird while he was writing A Simple Heart, in which a parrot is the last object...
...Barnes circulates among his historical and imaginary characters and in his agile writing strategies. Obviously he has pinched a thing or two from Nabokov, like the brazenness and wit of Pale Fire. Barnes concocts wonderful lists, full of unnerving distinctions: animals, for instance, an enumeration of Flaubert's many parrot references, along with the fact that there are no parrots in Madame Bovary. A chapter contains contrasting chronologies, one of the author's public career and honors, the other of his failures and the early deaths of many of his family and close friends. By the adroit use of such...
...found much greater latitude in the choice of subjects than was then permissible in England or the U.S., the effects sometimes distressed him. He admired Madame Bovary as, among other things, a perfectly rendered parable of degradation, more likely to frighten susceptible readers than seduce them: "Practically M. Flaubert is a potent moralist; whether, when he wrote his book, he was so theoretically is a matter best known to himself." But Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal provoked an attack on both the theorists of art for art's sake and the poet: "He went in search of corruption...
Capitalizing on the rage for things Oriental that had also seized writers such as Pierre Loti and Gustave Flaubert and scholars like Sir Richard Burton, the Orientalist artists vied with one another in seeking out exotica. Harems aside, the subjects that most mesmerized them were slave markets, carpet bazaars, whirling dervishes, Arab stallions, caravans of caparisoned camels and wind-whipped burnooses of Bedouins on the sands of the Sahara. "There is a fortune to be made for painters in Cairo," noted William Makepeace Thackeray on a visit to Egypt in 1844. "I never saw such a variety of architecture...