Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Although unpleasing is appearance, the cockroach once inspired a poem from post-modern novelist Christopher Morely...
...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 40 years returns to--well, that is not so clear...
...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 detail, Barnes builds a warmer personality for the novelist than his glacial public image. Flaubert's stiff shyness and pride, his solitary stance in life and self-described bearishness become signs of human vulnerability rather than the armor of an artist against the distractions of the world...
...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...