Julian Barnes - Flauberts Parrot

Witty and dazzling!

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

Flauberts Parrot is a book that by turns engages, impresses and finally bowls you over with its sharpness, wit and dazzling originality.

Los Angeles Herald Examiner

A gem: an unashamed literary novel that is also unashamed to be readable, and broadly entertaining. Bravo!

John Irving

Brilliant and witty.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

[Flauberts Parrot] tackles serious concepts with verve. Like the eponymous bird its funny but has much to say witty and playful.

Los Angeles Times

Delightful and enriching a book to revel in!

Joseph Heller

A small miracle of a novel that tantalizes and charms.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The pleasure in this book lies in the way Barnes circulates among his historical and imaginary characters and in his agile writing strategies.

Time

What a good book Julian Barnes has written! So clever and so sensitive at once.

Richard Ellmann

A wonderful reading experience.

Chicago Tribune

Barnes speak to anyone who loves the possibilities of literature.

Richmond Times Dispatch

In this free-form examination of the great French novelists life and artistic practice, amateur scholarship, cranky partisanship, and a passionate effort at self-understanding are amusingly assembled into a resonant literary comedy.

Christian Science Monitor

It is a cranky, brilliant book.

Wall Street Journal

JULIAN BARNES
Flauberts Parrot

Born in Leicester, England, in 1946, Julian Barnes is the author of nine novels, a book of stories, and collections of essays. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. In France he is the only writer to have won both the Prix Mdicis and the Prix Fmina, and in 1988 he was made a Chevalier de lOrdre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London.

ARTHUR & GEORGE

THE LEMON TABLE

SOMETHING TO DECLARE

LOVE, ETC .

ENGLAND, ENGLAND

CROSS CHANNEL

LETTERS FROM LONDON

THE PORCUPINE

TALKING IT OVER

A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 10 CHAPTERS

STARING AT THE SUN

BEFORE SHE MET ME

METROLAND

F IRST V INTAGE I NTERNATIONAL E DITION , D ECEMBER 1990

Copyright1984 by Julian Barnes

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, Ltd., London, in 1984 and in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1985.

Flauberts Parrot was first published in the London Review of Books, and Emma Bovarys Eyes first appeared in an edited form in Granta.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barnes, Julian.
Flauberts parrot/Julian Barnes1st Vintage international ed.
p. cm.(Vintage international)
eISBN: 978-0-307-79785-8
1. Flaubert, Gustave, 18211880, in fiction, drama, poetry, etc. I. Title.
PR6052.A6657F56 1990
823.914dc20 90-50162
CIP

Author photo copyrightMiriam Berkley

v3.1

To Pat

When you write the biography of a friend,
you must do it as if you were taking revenge for him.

Flaubert, letter to Ernest Feydeau, 1872

I am grateful to James Fenton and the Salamander Press for permission to reprint the lines from A German Requiem on . The translations in this book are by Geoffrey Braithwaite; though he would have been lost without the impeccable example of Francis Steegmuller.

J.B.

Six North Africans were playing boules beneath Flauberts statue. Clean cracks sounded over the grumble of jammed traffic. With a final, ironic caress from the fingertips, a brown hand dispatched a silver globe. It landed, hopped heavily, and curved in a slow scatter of hard dust. The thrower remained a stylish, temporary statue: knees not quite unbent, and the right hand ecstatically spread. I noticed a furled white shirt, a bare forearm and a blob on the back of the wrist. Not a watch, as I first thought, or a tattoo, but a coloured transfer: the face of a political sage much admired in the desert.

Let me start with the statue: the one above, the permanent, unstylish one, the one crying cupreous tears, the floppy-tied, square-waistcoated, baggy-trousered, straggle-moustached, wary, aloof bequeathed image of the man. Flaubert doesnt return the gaze. He stares south from the place des Carmes towards the Cathedral, out over the city he despised, and which in turn has largely ignored him. The head is defensively high: only the pigeons can see the full extent of the writers baldness.

This statue isnt the original one. The Germans took the first Flaubert away in 1941, along with the railings and door-knockers. Perhaps he was processed into cap-badges. For a decade or so, the pedestal was empty. Then a Mayor of Rouen who was keen on statues rediscovered the original plaster cast made by a Russian called Leopold Bernstamm and the city council approved the making of a new image. Rouen bought itself a proper metal statue in 93 per cent copper and 7 per cent tin: the founders, Rudier of Chtillon-sous-Bagneux, assert that such an alloy is guarantee against corrosion. Two other towns, Trouville and Barentin, contributed to the project and received stone statues. These have worn less well. At Trouville Flauberts upper thigh has had to be patched, and bits of his moustache have fallen off: structural wires poke out like twigs from a concrete stub on his upper lip.

Perhaps the foundrys assurances can be believed; perhaps this second-impression statue will last. But I see no particular grounds for confidence. Nothing much else to do with Flaubert has ever lasted. He died little more than a hundred years ago, and all that remains of him is paper. Paper, ideas, phrases, metaphors, structured prose which turns into sound. This, as it happens, is precisely what he would have wanted; its only his admirers who sentimentally complain. The writers house at Croisset was knocked down shortly after his death and replaced by a factory for extracting alcohol from damaged wheat. It wouldnt take much to get rid of his effigy either: if one statue-loving Mayor can put it up, another perhaps a bookish party-liner who has half-read Sartre on Flaubert might zealously take it down.

I begin with the statue, because thats where I began the whole project. Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why cant we leave well alone? Why arent the books enough? Flaubert wanted them to be: few writers believed more in the objectivity of the written text and the insignificance of the writers personality; yet still we disobediently pursue. The image, the face, the signature; the 93 per cent copper statue and the Nadar photograph; the scrap of clothing and the lock of hair. What makes us randy for relics? Dont we believe the words enough? Do we think the leavings of a life contain some ancillary truth? When Robert Louis Stevenson died, his business-minded Scottish nanny quietly began selling hair which she claimed to have cut from the writers head forty years earlier. The believers, the seekers, the pursuers bought enough of it to stuff a sofa.