Book club -- Flaubert's Parrot

I just thought, hm, since this isn't school or anything, we might as well start a thread and share delicious lines and things as we go, eh?

(That's a Canuck "eh")

Three Tales would be great too... chip in y'all...

I don't expect you *are* crap at these jobs really. I think the best writers are those who've lived in the world and mastered other skills. Shakespeare was an actor; Chaucer was a customs officer; Dickens was a diligent journalist. Of course, then you get exceptions like Emily Dickinson, I suppose - the ivory-tower brigade.

Hm, I'm sorry, I hadn't thought about the spoiler factor, how rotten of me... uh... hmm... it'd be so nice to sort of read along with people though...

mookieproof said: "I read Flaubert's Parrot a few years ago and frankly didn't find it particularly memorable. But I think it might be better via Ann... "

Hee hee... I'm a parrot's parrot's parrot...

Okay, now that this thread has been dug-up, I feel ever-so-much better that I didn't quite understand a lot of what was going on, even though I got quite a kick from some of the prose (and I'm in love the line that [in a paraphrase] goes something like: Who better to criticise prose than one who is prosaic?).

Looking forward to the beginning of the serious discussion here - I need someone to show me what was going on that I missed.

There's a lot to say about the way the book plays with questions about art, artists, "truth," etc., not to mention the bigger questions of what constitutes a life and how well we can understand anyone else's experience of the world (the old existentialist can-you-really-KNOW-someone line). But I won't blather on. The ending made me think of Citizen Kane and Rosebud, the futility of trying to know someone through something as simple as facts.

After finishing the book, I was left with a sense of Flaubert and his work, but also with the feeling that I had only seen the side of Flaubert that Barnes (or "Geoffrey Braithwaite") had wanted me to see. Unlike a regular biography, the book made no pretentions towards impartiality or completeness. Some may see that as a virtue - if such ideals are unattainable anyway, why should we pretend we can attain them? - but perhaps there is some value in striving for something, even if we can't fully reach it.

I'm not saying that a highly personalized account can't be valuable, particularly if the writer has a coherent argument to make, but Barnes style seemed mostly scattershot and catch-as-catch-can. Though I'm by no means a Flaubert expert, it felt like much of the time Barnes was reacting against the "conventional wisdom" of Flaubert studies and against particular Flaubert specialists whom he had read and disagreed with. But being unfamiliar with the specifics of what Barnes was reacting against, it was difficult to discern the shape of his argument at times, or to see it as much more than a laundry list of grievances. I have a suspicion that the book is best suited to someone who is already very well acquainted with Flaubert studies, who would know the gossip and backstory behind each of Barnes's rhetorical jabs.

I don't want to be too negative though, because I did enjoy the book overall. Barnes is effective at portraying Flaubert as a sort of timeless figure of the artist: cranky, perhaps a touch misanthropical, by no means devoid of ego - a man profoundly out of step with his times. This is a figure we can relate to, even if we don't know much about Flaubert, and even if these are the aspects of Flaubert that he himself would probably have least wanted to be remembered by.

I guess I'm a bit conflicted about whether I want to go on and read more Flaubert now. On the one hand, Barnes makes him seem like an interesting personality. But on the other hand, in Barnes's hands the personality starts to seem more interesting than the work itself. The work becomes merely the means by which Flaubert was able to maintain and project his personality: the fuel required to stoke the fires of his outsized ego. The specifics of the work become lost in a haze of abstractions about "Art", "Life" and "Beauty" - abstractions that Barnes is perhaps overly fond of relying on. If we are to believe that Flaubert teaches us something about Life and Art, then we have to believe that there is something called Life and something called Art - and that these somethings are more than just empty generalities.

O. Nate wrote about being "left with the feeling that I had only seen the side of Flaubert that Barnes (or 'Geoffrey Braithwaite') had wanted me to see". I got more of a sense that Barnes was trying to show us that Flaubert's life simply has too many sides, was just too damn ambiguous, for us to be able to accept anyone's representation of it as anything more than just fiction and totally dependant on perspective. Hence the three different contrasting accounts of his life in the chronologies chapter, the exam paper that only served to undermine any grasp I thought I had of the 'truth', the multiplicity of definitive parrots... Even the three different statues; IIRC, even the expensive one is slowly deteriorating and being shat on by the pigeons and really no closer to being a lasting semblance of the real thing.

I would like to read Flaubert's letters but maybe not the novels. It would be interesting to see how the book would change after i read some of those.

Whether there are some biographical things in there or not, it is fiction. So the recklessness of the history and facts and the scattershot nature of grievances (who I think are Braithwaite's and not Barnes's) is completely acceptable to me, and served a narrative purpose to boot: that this man's obsession, however benign, is an outlet for a lot of negative feelings. Braithwaite is a measured man, but he can get wildly upset regarding Flaubert.

And so, I wasn't too upset by the gimick of having Geoffrey Braithwaite as the narrator - in that Barnes is presenting us part of this "person" (Braithwaite) who is then presenting us part of another "person" (Flaubert). And it is these layers of shadows and being shown only what the author(s) want us to see that exemplify how all of us present (and leave behind) only fascets of our identity.

Of course, as I still haven't read anything by Flaubert and know virtually nothing about the man, other than what Barnes presents here, I have no idea of the validity of any of the "facts" about his life/remnants of his life that Braithwaite presents to us as being real and important. And I am unable to see any parallels with Flaubert's works.

I find myself agreeing with this general consensus. I wanted to care about Braithwaite and his dead wife, but I feel that there were certain structural factors that mitigated against this outcome. For one, the fact that the wife isn't introduced until midway into the book, by which time Flaubert himself has been firmly esconced as the main character, insofar as the book can be said to have one. For another, that we hear very little about her, outside of one vague chapter.

There seemed to be little of the braitwaite stuff in comparison to the amount devoted to Flaubert's life but to me it didn't feel tacked on or superficial, more that this man is truly obessed because he wants to use flaubert to dull the pain of his wife's death.

That is an interesting reading, and it does provide one possible explanation of why Barnes chose to conjoin the themes of dealing with death and the study of history. Though if that is indeed the connection, I struggle to see how it is more than just a superficial one. I mean, why did it have to be Flaubert? What if Braithwaite was an entomologist rather than an amateur biographer? Then we could have had a book of witty reflections on termites, interpolated with brief brooding passages on loss and mortality. I don't see how psychologically it would have made any difference.

I got more of a sense that Barnes was trying to show us that Flaubert's life simply has too many sides, was just too damn ambiguous, for us to be able to accept anyone's representation of it as anything more than just fiction and totally dependant on perspective

I agree with you that Barnes is certainly aware of the dangers of reducing a life to pat didacticism, and he does indeed show the pitfalls of tendentious biography with those three chronologies that you mentioned. I guess my criticism was not so much that Barnes is trying to reduce Flaubert to a simple moral, but rather that he gives us a hint of what a really good Flaubert biography would be like, but he doesn't really deliver it. It's almost like I wish he would just shed the "Braithwaite" framing device and just write us a really damn good Flaubert biography.

So the recklessness of the history and facts and the scattershot nature of grievances (who I think are Braithwaite's and not Barnes's) is completely acceptable to me, and served a narrative purpose to boot: that this man's obsession, however benign, is an outlet for a lot of negative feelings

As I alluded to above, I have difficulty viewing all of the Flaubert material through the lens of Braithwaite and his grief. For one thing, Barnes spends so much more time on Flaubert than he does on Braithwaite, that it seems almost perverse to try and mentally tip the scales in the opposite direction. I find myself more tempted to try and understand Braithwaite through the lens of Flaubert. ie., "What would Flaubert think of Braithwaite?" - rather than "What does Braithwaite think of Flaubert?"

I know some of you have you have declared a lack of familiarity w/ Flaubert's work so it might be worth highlighting the basic parallels with Madame Bovary. 'Scuse me if you know this already, but maybe it'll help illuminate the Braithwaite thing for thems that don't. Ellen Braithwaite, just like Emma Bovary (check the initials!), commits suicide after an adulterous affair. Both their husbands, Geoffrey Braithwaite and Charles Bovary are doctors (and firmly middle-class ones at that). Hence Braithwaite's obsession - maybe by understanding why Flaubert had Emma kill herself (and why Flaubert saw the world as a place where suicide was Emma's only way out) Braithwaite can come to terms with his own wife's suicide.

I find myself more tempted to try and understand Braithwaite through the lens of Flaubert. ie., "What would Flaubert think of Braithwaite?"

That's a really interesting point and maybe gets down to the whole nubbins of Braithwaite's obsession. Madame Bovary is very much a hatchet job on the bourgeoisie, and none takes as much stick as Dr. Charles Bovary, so tamed by middle-class convention, so stunted in his imagination, so inadequate as a husband. At some level, Braithwaite (himself so hidebound by convention that his fantasy rebellion scenario is going through the wrong lane at customs) is bound to take that as a rejection of himself by Flaubert, who, if you like, is his authorial father.

Think of the chapter in MB when she takes her lover to the boarding hotel in Rouen and Flaubert simply describes the room without the sexual act. It's charged with eroticism. Barnes (through GB) is making a point about biographers cramming in facts while the overall impression passs them by. The absence of detail.

Two great quotes:
"Mr Andrieu had told this story before; he knew its pauses."
"When the chest is flat, one is nearer the heart."

Last time I was in Rouen, I spent hours trying to locate Flaubert's house. Despite two maps and several helpful locals, I never found it.

NickB, i agree that the book does whet your appetite for Flaubert and i have a feeling that Barnes would be fine with that!

I was wondering, has anyone else here read Reading Lolita in Tehran? A lot of that memoir centered around discussion and literary criticism of some of the classics of the Western Canon (Gatsby, Daisy Miller, Lolita, etc.) and while the author's point seemed to be how literature can help one asses their community and self, I found myself wondering if someone who was not familiar with the texts and/or lit. crit. would have much interest in the memoir. (I've ended-up adding a lot of the books that she covered to my "To Read" list, after hearing her comments and insights into the texts.)

I liked it too. I like the early chapter on animals in Flaubert's books even better! It reminded me of the turtle chapter in _Grapes of Wrath_, a sort of meta chapter. An overview of the animals in Flaubert's books, animals being metaphors, metaphors not lost on Briathwaite, but then how and what Braithwaite tends to focus on is even more telling in regards to him than Flaubert. And reading Flaubert's lines about animals was a lot of fun, too.

I then tried to think of all the animals in Woody Allen films for some reason. There are lobsters in Annie Hall.

ILB Book Club 2.0 - L'Education Sentimentale

I can't BELIEVE I've spent my whole life up to now NOT reading this book.

the chronology chapter - A++++

nothing else like it

nothing else quite like it, but it's similar to a lot of things i've loved in the past - though in subject matter more than style

barnes is hilarious