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| Flaubert's Parrot (Vintage International) | 
 enlarge | Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Category: Book
List Price: £7.79
Buy Used: £2.70
You Save: £5.09 (65%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 1063344
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reissue
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 4.9 x 0.6
ISBN: 0679731369
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780679731368
ASIN: 0679731369
Publication Date: November 1990
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Item in good condition at a great price! SHIPS FROM UNITED STATES. Avg Delivery Times are 7-24 business days (may take 6-8 weeks due to customs delays). Visit Got Books for all your media needs.
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| Customer Reviews:
DEAD PARROTS SOCIETY November 19, 2006
13 out of 28 found this review helpful
What I always keep in mind about Flaubert is that Raymond Chandler admired him. From my own distant recollections of Flaubert, I'd guess that what appealed to such a craftsman as Chandler was the workmanship - in both authors one has a similar sense that every sentence and indeed every word has been worked on with minute precision. On the other hand, Chandler was scathing about pretentiousness and affectation too. I never managed to finish anything by Flaubert because I found him a bit too literary in an offputting sense, and this was no doubt not his fault but mine. However I have to say that when it comes to Julian Barnes this is now the third novel of his that I have read, and for all his outstanding gifts he is beginning to get on my nerves slightly.
There is something rather preening and self-regarding about Barnes, I find. I don't deny him creative originality for a moment, but that comes across to me as being secondary to a wish to exercise and display his accomplishment as a writer. The way this book is put together is undeniably effective. Flaubert has a Dr Bovary , and Dr Bovary has a wife Emma who is unfaithful and kills herself. Barnes has a Dr Braithwaite who has a wife Ellen who was unfaithful and killed herself. Some combination of Dr Braithwaite and Mr Barnes (very skilfully alternated) research Flaubert's life, hanging their researches, cleverly but rather artificially, around the identification of a parrot called Loulou belonging to Flaubert's housekeeper. The significance of the parrot, I'd say, is principally to provide a good eye-catching title for the book rather than anything more essential. Dr Braithwaite is very lacklustre as a personality, and while I'm sure that was deliberate on the author's part I'm equally certain he thought his denouement was more effective and less predictable than I have just found it to be.
The way this kind of book takes me is that I find the factual material a lot more involving than the `human interest'. So far as I can tell, the research seems to have been meticulous, and I always like to see popular and superficial misconceptions put right. All the same, I could have done with less self-congratulation from Barnes and in particular with less sense of pettiness in the points he scores. Poor old Enid Starkey! I dare say she annoyed him and for all I know she might have annoyed me too, but the triumphs Barnes awards himself are not really very important. If Barnes wants to be as nitpicking as this I may as well point out to him that `ipsophagy' is a dreadful mixture of Latin and Greek roots, and if he wanted to coin such a term it ought to have been `hautophagy'.
Obviously, reactions of this kind are subjective on my part, but this is literature and I don't see any way round that. The author's personality as he projects it is not entirely a sympathetic one to me for the reasons I've attempted to explain, but other readers will doubtless react differently. What seems to me a lot less subjective is the sheer quality of what Barnes does. The man is a master and no two ways about that, I'm happy to agree. The book is all over in less than 200 pages anyway, and it is instructive as well as highly readable. Whether it has fired me up to read more by Julian Barnes is maybe doubtful, but it might just get me to have another go at Flaubert.
Maybe parrots cry, even stuffed ones April 24, 2006
16 out of 17 found this review helpful
This is an interesting book in the way it is structured especially with the play of so drastically varying the way the chapters were written.
Nonetheless, I am not sure that the frame of Mr.Braithwaite, the narrrator and doctor, around the biography of Flaubert, works. I had to keep going back to what his sad tale was which gets muddled between the suicide of his wife and the loner adulterous life of Flaubert. This became more like a prop rather than a person to enhance the analysis of Flaubert's life. On the other hand, the parrot dilemma brings the book full circle.
I was held though by how Barnes created a dialogue with this early 19th century author and felt frustrated that I was not more familiar with Flaubert's writing and modernist presence so ahead of his time.
As an aspiring writer, a second career, I noted many quote/phrases from Flaubert. Barnes must have done incredible research and the excitement was to be inside Flaubert's person through Barnes's interpretation. Perhaps this reader wanted to feel less intellectual and more in touch with the soul of Flaubert's life, to feel rather than read of 'his passions'. Perhaps Flaubert could not show his heart, though Barnes speaks of how crying came easily.
Maybe parrots cry, even stuffed ones.
Definitely a great read by an inventive author.
Voltaire author intrigued and impressed November 21, 2003
11 out of 31 found this review helpful
Having written a comic novel in which I resuscitate Voltaire to see how he'd like Switzerland in the 21st century, ("A Visit from Voltaire") I can't resist reading books that play with form to retrieve writers of the past, even to the extent that the authors deconstruct or reconfigure the admired writer in personal terms, e.g. Alain de Botton's "Why We Read Proust," as well as this one. In the Proust book, de Botton presents the relevance of Proust's experiences both real and literary in straightforward essays, (almost classroom lectures,) while Barnes' approach is more oblique, original, and playful. He flits from style to style, voice to voice, ranging from the three variations on a curriculuum vitae for Flaubert to a literature exam. But he takes the conceit one step further in unveiling Flaubert's life through the eye of a narrator, a doctor whose wife has died. I was curious about Flaubert, and enjoyed learning as much as I did from Barnes, but in the end, found the doctor's narrative sometimes bloodless. I don't think this device has worn well with time; Barnes himself seems undecided as to whether the doctor's quest is his front story or back story or just a leitmotif on adultery and suicide. That said, I'll probably be reading it a second time for its literary commentary and sheer affection for the subject matter.
Dinah Lee Küng, author, "A Visit from Voltaire" "Under Their Skin"
 Pretentious? Oui! August 12, 2003
11 out of 20 found this review helpful
This is not a novel, it is a collection of essays on the life of French author Gustave Flaubert. The whole thing is loosely tied together by the sketchy story of the supposed 'narrator' a retired doctor and Flaubert fanatic trying to cope with his wife's suicide. However this part is so underdeveloped it is superfluous. In realty what we get is Barnes on Flaubert, France and literature. Cut out the fictional elements and the book would loose about 20% of its length and would make a in interesting if slightly quirky biography of Flaubert. How this won any prizes for fiction is beyond me. I suspect it seemed very clever back in the early 1980s now it just seems indulgent. The portrait of Flaubert is interesting if somewhat repetitive, but dressing this collection of essays up as a novel is pure pretention.
 Nothing But Net November 23, 2002
15 out of 19 found this review helpful
This is not the book that landed The Booker Prize for Mr. Barnes. I have read the novel that did win, "England, England", and I feel this is every bit as good. There are some familiar variants on phrases he has used before, and while they are not entirely new, neither are not boringly repetitive. I also enjoyed the abrupt changes in vantage point, a perspective change that altered the cadence of the novel.
Mr. Barnes has truly assembled this work as opposed to progressing from one chapter to the next. The first clever use of this is when you come upon a Chronology of Flaubert's life, nothing-unusual here. However, Mr. Julian Barnes is anything but another quick wit with a pen. So the reader is treated to 3 distinct chronologies, the subject is essentially the same; however the only true commonality is on the date they end. The voice they are written in changes and with this modification the mood as well.
We have a narrator who loosely guides us through the tale; however a range of stylistic changes intrudes upon his narrative. Intrude is probably too strong a word, for it all works, it all makes sense when placed in the complete context of the book. For one example, I cannot remember the last time I read a novel and found myself subjected to a test, complete with parameters, what is not acceptable regarding the form of answer, and finally a time limit. It did cause uncomfortable suppressed memories of literature exams, but the unpleasant moment is blessedly short. It will depend on how fond you were of written tests.
The Parrot is much more than a bird, and even when it does appear as an ornithologist would describe the creature, the number varies widely, as do the locations and clues to the one true bird. Throughout the balance of the book the word Parrot and the countless variations of language are not only extremely clever, they show the range of this man's grasp on language, his, and many others. This could have been a vacuous display of the use of a thesaurus, but Mr. Barnes does not use various words as decoration, he uses them because they are precisely what he needs.
There has only been one book that I would not recommend starting with, and that is "Metroland". This book is as good as any of the 6 or 7 I have read, and so far is one of the top 2. So start where you may, odds are this man's work will delight.
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