Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...literary bestiary, Flaubert's Parrot is actually a centaur--a splendid hybrid with the scholarly countenance of literary criticism and the powerful headquarters of a good novel. Such crossbreeding of genres is not mythical or even uncommon in 20th century literature--take Nabokov's career, for example, which includes a novel in the guise of an annotated poem. Pale Fire, and a literary biography that's also a comic masterpiece. Nikolai Gogol. What makes Julian Barnes's achievement so remarkable, however, is the sheer lack of artifice and pyrotechnics involved...
...novel begins and ends with an bit of literary taxidermy. The loose structure is contained within the story of Braithwaite's search for the stuffed parrot which served as the model for Loulou, the parrot of this housekeeper Felicite in Flaubert's tale "Us Center Simple" ("A. Simple Heart"). More than the trivial by-product of Braithwaite's loopy obsession, the quest for the real parrot becomes a tongue-in-beak metaphor for the essence of Flaubert...
...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...
...conceivable that Khomeini is actually faking his religiosity, that his Islamic scholarship and humble, spartan lifestyle are actually a front. Someone wrote a novel on the premise a few years ago, with Western intelligence agents waiting a generation to be called to active service...
...Platz. Undula- ting red brick terraces hug the slope, relaxed and vaguely mock-ancient, not abrasive Disneyland replicas. As ever, Hollein succeeds in pleasing with the highly particular small space, the odd cutout corner or voluptuous semicircular marble stair. Monchengladbach has the virtuoso exuberance of a big, ambitious first novel, brimming with every story fragment and shimmery turn of phrase the author can muster...