Word: parroting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Still, the 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...
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...
...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 of a gentle old woman's affection. Looking into its beady eye, Braithwaite suddenly feels close to his own idol...
...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...
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...