Reading 1001 discussion

Flaubert's Parrot - Julian Barnes. 4 stars. Finished 05/10.

What was this book about? A non-conventional biography of Flaubert featuring chronologies, parrots, exam papers, Emma Bovary's eyes, literary criticism, obsession, love and the narrative of a Flaubert-obsessed doctor dealing with his wife's suicide.

I thought this book was going to be totally pretentious. It is certainly weird but I ended up really enjoying it.

My review:
This novel is about a biographer who visits Rouen to explore museums dedicated to Gustave Flaubert. He discovers that two different museums have a stuffed parrot on display, and both claim they have THE parrot Flaubert had on his desk for a few weeks while writing about a parrot. The writer becomes obsessed with tracking down the truth about which parrot Flaubert had on his desk.
The novel explores Flaubert's life, and in my opinion is a cheap trick to con novel-readers into reading and buying a biography on Gustave Flaubert. Despite the framing of the biography within the context of the writer-character's efforts to understand what happened with Flaubert's parrot, one could easily forget that many of the chapters were within a fiction book. Considering how much better novels sell compared with biographies, it does make sense to try to pass off a biography as a novel, and in this case the result even landed on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list.
I liked this book, and gave it 4 stars on Goodreads. It is not my favorite Barnes novel, but as a biography it was interesting, and since I have read Madame Bovary, it was interesting getting a different perspective on that novel.

Rating: 3.5 stars

A biography of Gustave Flaubert embedded into a novel. Truly it reads much more like non-fiction than fiction. I haven't read anything quite like this before. It took me a while to get into it, but it did get very interesting and informative. Quite a few other 1001 books and their author's were mentioned in this book.

I read this for my TBR challenge for 2022.
The main character Geoffrey Braithwaite is a retired British doctor who is obsessed with Gustave Flaubert. Also, his wife has recently died and this presents a minor secret throughout most of the book as Braithwaite tells us a few times that he will tell us about that latter. Largely Braithwaite is fascinated by Flaubert's life and how that life did or did not impact his writing. The book cover says this is a Meta fiction and that probably refers to the fact that we are given chronologies of Flaubert's life with the facts delivered from a positive point of view and then the same facts from a negative point of view. We are also given dictionaries, a list of his pets and references to beasts, some exam questions and quite importantly a legal case study for why everything the critics say about Flaubert is either wrong or immaterial. As Jamie mentions, Meta can be very pretentious but this book is highly engaging, a great condensed biography of Flaubert albeit from a totally unreliable source and a nice little pummeling of critics.
The fact that the structure of the book pivots around a multitude of stuffed parrots would be sure to be something Flaubert himself would approve.
To those who have not read the book, it is worth reading the short story: 'Un coeur simple' before reading this book in order to get a proper introduction to Flaubert's parrot.

I should have probably read some Flaubert before reading this, and it certainly made me want to read his work. But I got plenty out of it without having read Flaubert. The novel mixes non-fiction and fiction in a way that makes it difficult to know what is real and what is made up, something that is also a theme in the book: What do we really know about the past or another person? Is any source truly trustworthy? And so we get several biographies of Flaubert, tours of Rouen, lists and letters, multiple stuffed parrots, essay assignments about whether art imitates life or the other way around, and a narrator who tries to escape his own past and who occasionally addresses the reader directly.

Very enjoyable. 4 stars.

Read in 2015

I enjoyed this work but not because it is a good novel. If you want to read a straightforward story this would not be a good choice. I would describe this as a book that is many things. It is a biographical story of Gustave Flaubert. It is a discussion of literary techniques and writing and within these aspects is the story of Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired doctor who is traveling around France searching out truths of Gustave Flaubert. It starts with the Parrot, the stuffed parrot that was borrowed from the Museum of Rouen to help with writing one of Flaubert’s novels and the discovering that there is more than one stuffed parrot. Which is the real parrot? But there is something else that is driving Geoffrey besides his obsession with Flaubert. There is another mystery besides the parrot. Slowly the reader is given bits and pieces of information of Geoffrey. We know his wife is gone. He even says to us “you think I killed her” I really enjoyed the discourse on literary mistakes, choices of endings (happy/unhappy, half and half, modernist, end of the world, cliffhanger, surrealist, opaque, dream. And as always, I like books about grieving and death. So in many ways this earned four stars for me though I expect I will be in the minority.

Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes
2 stars

I am glad that this is over. I can see why this book was chosen for the list as it has a unique style of telling a story but it did not work for me. This was a struggle for me to get through, I was not engaged in the story at all. Different strokes for different folks, this was just not for me.

I found some sections of this book interesting, and other sections completely lost my attention. As the fictional narrator described Flaubert's life and his own, my main thought was curiosity about which parts about Flaubert were truly fact and which were fiction. In went in knowing nothing about Flaubert except that he was an author, so I might consider revisiting this after reading Madame Bovary. I would not recommend it at all to someone without an interest in Gustave Flaubert.

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 narrative (whose truth is it?), life imitating art and vice versa, and an examination of what different forms of writing offer - but running alongside is the rather poignant story of Geoffrey and his dead wife, and I would have liked a bit more of that story and less of the biographical lists and chronology.

Pre-2016 review:

***

I am not too sure about how to describe my appreciation for this book. It started well, with the story of the parrot and the first investigative steps taken by the narrator in order to establish the truth in this matter. But, by the time we reach the "Train-Spotter's Guide to Flaubert" chapter, I felt that the novel went off the tracks (no pun intended, maybe it is just coincidence or irony) and that we were going nowhere. True, all this investigative meandering and the different narrative techniques used were meant to show us that art can mimic life and that, if we sift through history's layers of dust (or the museum's forgotten stuffed parrots), we can never really find the truth; but the reading experience from that point on became a bit tedious, even though learning a bit more about Flaubert was a bonus. Nevertheless, if I were to compare between this novel and Byatt's Possession as examples of literary investigation, the former would win hands down.