Flaubert's Parrot
by Julian Barnes
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Book Summary Information
Author: Julian BarnesEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1990-11-27
ISBN: 0679731369
Number of pages: 192
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Flaubert's Parrot
Book Review: Julian Barnes on How Flaubert Can or Can't Change Your Life
Summary: 5 Stars
"Flaubert's Parrot, c'est moi." (Fran Lebowitz)
When someone mentions Flaubert in conversation, the first thing that usually pops into one's head is - almost inevitably - "Madame Bovary". The first thing I think of though is "Flaubert's Parrot" by Julian Barnes.
It has become not uncommon for the Brits to write perceptive analysis of French authors - Alain de Botton's "How Prouste Can Change Your Life" is only a recent example. It's probably the very nature of a complicated relationship between the two countries, their often emphasized difference that bears fruit like Barnes' masterpiece: profound knowledge of the close neighbor, on one hand, and on the other, an ability to keep one's distance and stay aloof, for the purposes of estranged observation. Barnes employs both. As a result, we have a work of art that is neither English nor French, but both, in which English irony and self-scrutiy mingle with French grace and wit in a most successful combination.
"Flaubert's Parrot" is also a mixture of styles, both fiction and literary criticism, diary and biography. We get to view Flaubert's life though the eyes of one Doctor Geoffrey Braithwaite who sets off to reconstruct the writer's life in order to - probably - better understand the human nature and thus to - possibly - comprehend a mystery of his own wife's suicide.
In Flaubert's melancholy the protagonist finds - perhaps an illusionary - comfort, almost a feeling of shared sadness which he might fail to encounter among his contemporary friends, in case he has any. It actually seems that Gustave, as Braithwaite takes to calling the writer, is his only friend. There is an "advantage of making friends with those already dead." Both are lonely, prone to self-analysis and are mourning a loss: Flaubert, of his mother; the doctor, of his wife.
A curious "animal-theory" introduced by Barnes could have become the ground for a Ph.D. study by one of those contemporary scholars who often turn to obscure topics having run out of traditional ones. Throughout his notes Flaubert compares himself to a number of animals, but "secretly, essentially, he is a Bear." It truly tells us more about his character than it might seem. We tend to see ourselves through others. Every one of us has a fluffy, flying or even creepy counterpart in the animal kingdom. Horoscopes tell us we are "aries", "pisces", "leos", "scorpios", "capricorns". Barnes plays with linguistic variations of the French word "ours" (a rough fellow, a police cell) and it's literary allusions (La Fontaine's fable). Now we have yet another image of the writer: Flaubear.
But then why is the book called Flaubert's Parrot?
We are to participate in yet another quest that Doctor Braithwaite undertakes: there exists a stuffed parrot which supposedly inspired Flaubert to write "Un Coer Simple", a story about a poor lonely woman and her bird.Which is also a symbol of the writer's grotesque and his other animal counterpart, according to Braithwaite.
Braithwaite's notes about France where he travels in "a packed cross-Channel ferry,..a modern ship of fools" are alternated with Flaubert's about England - another hint to the "mixed background" of the book. The same with the past and present: they intervene, implicate and compliment each other, cancel and suggest each other's truths. The protagonist tries to reconstruct the past through memoirs, literature, Things which feed his imagination. Braithwaite does not find the past romantic, or better, or particularly interesting - it is merely a framework of Flaubert's creativity, an ambiance of his exitence. It simply is. Flaubert's view of his time was not much brighter than Braithwaite's of today's world. After all, OUR past was only HIS everyday present.
The most fascinating and subtle interplay of the two lives is to be found in the last chapters, in which Braithwaite tells a story of his marriage and of his wife's death. The dead writer comments on it, from the past. The story is intermingled with the episodes of Flaubert's life that have to do with grief.
Braithwaite's wife was unfaithful ("Madame Bovary, c'est moi"?). Through Flaubert's writing he seeks to understand the nature of her adultery. Was it simply, as Nabokov put it, "a most conventional way to rise above the conventional"? or was she merely unhappy? It strikes us that Braithwaite is a doctor, just like Charles Bovary. It does not surprise us that he does not find any solutions in the book:"Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this..." Books and dissertations might explain why Emma commited adultery and died. Nothing will explain why Ellen did. Braithwaite is left tete-a-tete with himself, like Gustave after his beloved mother's death.
Braithwaite is alone, at the end of his parrot-quest, facing three identical parrots at the provincial French museum of Natural History. "Perhaps...we should prefer the consolation of non-fulfillment."
Well, perhaps.
Summary of Flaubert's Parrot
A kind of detective story, relating a cranky amateur scholar's search for the truth about Gustave Flaubert, and the obsession of this detective whose life seems to oddly mirror those of Flaubert's characters.Just what sort of book is Flaubert's Parrot, anyway? A literary biography of 19th-century French novelist, radical, and intellectual impresario Gustave Flaubert? A meditation on the uses and misuses of language? A novel of obsession, denial, irritation, and underhanded connivery? A thriller complete with disguises, sleuthing, mysterious meetings, and unknowing targets? An extended essay on the nature of fiction itself?
On the surface, at first, Julian Barnes's book is the tale of an elderly English doctor's search for some intriguing details of Flaubert's life. Geoffrey Braithwaite seems to be involved in an attempt to establish whether a particularly fine, lovely, and ancient stuffed parrot is in fact one originally "borrowed by G. Flaubert from the Museum of Rouen and placed on his worktable during the writing of Un coeur simple, where it is called Loulou, the parrot of Felicité, the principal character of the tale."
What begins as a droll and intriguing excursion into the minutiae of Flaubert's life and intellect, along with an attempt to solve the small puzzle of the parrot--or rather parrots, for there are two competing for the title of Gustave's avian confrere--soon devolves into something obscure and worrisome, the exploration of an arcane Braithwaite obsession that is perhaps even pathological. The first hint we have that all is not as it seems comes almost halfway into the book, when after a humorously cantankerous account of the inadequacies of literary critics, Braithwaite closes a chapter by saying, "Now do you understand why I hate critics? I could try and describe to you the expression in my eyes at this moment; but they are far too discoloured with rage." And from that point, things just get more and more curious, until they end in the most unexpected bang.
One passage perhaps best describes the overall effect of this extraordinary story: "You can define a net in one of two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally, you would say that it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string." Julian Barnes demonstrates that it is possible to catch quite an interesting fish no matter how you define the net. --Andrew Himes
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