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Flaubert's Parrot

Julian Barnes

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What Members Thought

Jun 07, 2008 El rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-books-list, 20th-centurylit-late

Julian Barnes first won my heart in A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters in which there is a chapter written from the point-of-view of a woodworm on Noah's Ark. It was such a refreshing change of pace and I adored it. Since reading that several years ago I have put off reading anything else by Barnes, hoping to retain that feeling lest History was a fluke. I bought a copy of Flaubert's Parrot a while back but kept it on the back burner, again to avoid being disappointed by Barnes, but also ...more

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Feb 02, 2022 Camelia Rose rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audio, historical-fiction

Flaubert's Parrot is a strange book. I pick it up because I like the author, not because I am interested in Flaubert. The book looks like a biography, but the narrator is not Julian Barnes himself, instead, it is a fictional amateur Gustave Flaubert expert Geoffrey Braithwaite. Barnes got me fooled until the chapter about the lost-and-found-then-burned letters between Flaubert and an English governess. After that, the book becomes interesting.

My favorite chapter is Chapter 7, where Louise Colet ...more

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May 16, 2024 Wendy rated it liked it

Shelves: audiobooks, 1001-books, 2024

I enjoyed this as a creative, intertextual, and occasionally humorous exploration of author Gustave Flaubert's life and works via the obsessive compilation of a (loosely?) fictional narrator, though it feels like a stretch to call this a novel. It's not. It's a collection of well written, interesting essays that flit somewhere on the border of academic and literary fiction(ish). There are lists of metaphors Flaubert used to describe himself, a diatribe against railways, an aside about taking bri ...more

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Oct 06, 2024 Pamela rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: boxall-1001-read, guardian-1000-read

This was quite an intriguing story based on the works of Gustave Flaubert. The narrator, retired doctor Geoffrey Braithwaite, is obsessed with Flaubert and visits his hometown Rouen and other connected sites. He discovers that two museums each have an exhibit claiming to be the parrot Flaubert had on his desk while writing Un coeur simple and from this the book unfolds.

It deals wittily and sensitively with some of those themes that modern authors seem to love - primarily the truth of the narrati ...more

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