s p o t l i g h t
FLAUBERT'S PARROT
AUTHOR
Julian Barnes (England, 1946- )
AWARDS
1988, the Grinzane Cavour
1986, the Prix Midicis
1985, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize
1984, the Booker Prize (shortlisted)
RELEASED
1984
SUMMARY
Flaubert's Parrot was considered a breakthrough novel for Barnes, about an English doctor's
preoccupation with Gustave Flaubert. The novel weaves a tapestry of allusion, reference and
improvisation with the realities of the good doctor Geoffrey Braithwaite who, in retirement, delights
in indulging--to extremity--his obsession with the famous French author. Publisher Knopf, who
rereleased the book in 1990, describes Barnes' novel as "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."
AUTHOR LINKS
Julian Barnes Website
BOOK REVIEW
Excerpted from a review for Amazon.com
"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
INTERVIEWS
Transcript from Radio 4's Book
Club, Sunday 5th December. (James Naughtie talks to Julian Barnes about one of his novels,
Flaubert's Parrot.)
STUDENT ESSAY
Partners
in Crime: Julian Barnes and Gustave Flaubert by Jenna Beletic/Hawaii Preparatory
Academy
OVERVIEW
Julian Barnes: An
Overview
JULIAN BARNES ON MAGICAL REALISM
from Michael Woods' article in Janus Head (see the entire article as a PDF file)
"For the last twenty years or so magical realism--the term and the practice--has been the victim of its own success. Already in 1984 JulianBarnes mockingly called for a reduction in its output through the voice of his narrator in Flaubert's Parrot: 'A quota system isto be introduced on fiction set in South America. The intention is tocurb the spread of package-tour baroque and heavy irony. Ah, the pro-pinquity of cheap life and expensive principles … ah, the fredonna treewhose roots grow at the tips of its branches and whose fibres assist thehunchback to impregnate by telepathy the haughty wife of the haciendaowner; ah, the opera house now overgrown by jungle.' ”
CRITICS
"Mr. Barnes hasn't written this novel directly or simply. Rather, he has appropriately given us the
story of an obsession with Flaubert. The result is a splendid hybrid of a novel, part biography, part
fiction, part literary criticism, the whole carried off with great bio. Flaubert's Parrot' is high literary
entertainment."-- Peter Brooks, The New York Times
"This clever treatise on Flaubert would be easier to read than to listen to. Despite the lively voice of the British narrator, the text is too dense to understand without close study. The quotations are especially hard to follow. It's often difficult to tell whether the words are those of Flaubert or the author or another critic entirely. Perhaps Crawford Logan's charming rendition of the author's wit and wisdom could be enjoyed by dedicated Flaubert scholars in search of an etymological treat."--Jo Carr, AudioFile
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