Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat."

"Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own."

My fifth book by Julian Barnes and it is back to the greatness of The Sense of an Ending . Flaubert's Parrot (1984), one of Barnes' earliest books, was - in my layman's view - quite deservedly shortlisted for the Booker Prize: it flirts with greatness. Of course some bias may be showing as the book deals with one of my literary obsessions: human inability to know the past. Past is like a "greased piglet" says Mr. Barnes:

"People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process."

Geoffrey Braithwaite, the narrator of the story, a "60+ widowed doctor [...] cheerful if inclined to melancholy", is an "amateur Flaubert scholar." He travels to France to follow the steps of Gustave Flaubert, the author of Madame Bovary and other influential novels of the 19th century. The narrator wants to understand Flaubert, learn the writer's life story, and find the "truth" about his relationships with other people. But as his research uncovers various inconsistent accounts of events and interpretations of motives from Flaubert's life, Mr. Braithwaite begins to ask pointedly "[H]ow can we know anybody?" Does seeking truth about the past make sense? Past is elusive and truth even more so. Perhaps the most memorable device used by Mr. Barnes is the so-called Chronology of Flaubert's life, the itemized list of important events that happened to the writer. But there are three chronologies, each very different than the other two, and each of them true.

I think it is a little misleading to call Flaubert's Parrot a novel: true, a narrative thread can be discerned, yet it is marginal in comparison to the real essence of the book. Mr. Barnes offers a set of essays on various topics related to Flaubert and literature in general. Some of them are brilliant, for instance, the essay on so-called "errors" committed by authors and exemplified by Flaubert supposedly being inconsistent about the color of Emma Bovary's eyes. Mr. Barnes devastatingly ridicules writings of one Dr. Enid Starkie, a real-life British biographer of Flaubert. Very funny! Another wonderful essay, in the chapter titled Flaubert's Apocrypha, deals with books that Flaubert did not write. A fascinating read!

I love the passage that begins with Mr. Barnes mentioning how Flaubert had been observing sun go down one day in 1853 and commenting that "it resembled a large disc of redcurrant jam." Then - on a tantalizing tangent - Mr. Barnes asks whether the colors of the past are the same as colors of today and ends with

"We look at the sun through smoked glass; we must look at the past through coloured glass."

Yet I think the chapter where Mr. Braithwaite's writes about his wife who had died some years ago is the most stunning. Through beautiful prose the wife - a fictitious character, like Mr. Braithwaite himself - feels like the most real person in the entire book, in fact more real than Flaubert. The chapter is a wonderful coda to this enchanting set of ruminations about elusiveness of the past.

And what about the parrot? Well, while in a museum Mr. Braithwaite looks at a stuffed parrot that might have been the one Flaubert looked at when writing Un cœur simple. Was it really? Read this great book to find out.

Four and a half stars.




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