Flaubert's Parrot (1984) (edit title/settings)

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Characters/People edit see section history

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• Geoffrey Braithwaite: narrator, over sixty, and is a widowed doctor with two children. Geoffrey is an amateur Flaubert scholar.
• Kopf: Add a description of this character.
• Mann
• Blick
• Wasser
• Betty Corrinder: A woman who is likened to the Eiffel Tower, except that more people have 'been up her'.
• Gustave Flaubert: Nineteenth-century father of realism and Madame Bovary. He is the subject of Braithwaite's painful search.
• Ellen: Geoffrey's dead wife.
• Ed Winterton: A fellow amateur scholar, but searching for an English writer called Gosse.
• Louise Colet: Flaubert's lover; she was petty and controlling, but also perhaps misunderstood among her lover's friends.
• Maxime du Camp: Flaubert's 'social conscience'. From his notes we can access the man outside of his prose.
• Caroline: Flaubert's niece.
• Nero: One of the names of the dog owned by Flaubert's first love.
• Achille: The name of Flaubert's father and brother, both of whom were doctors.
• Thabor: The other name given to the dog owned by Flaubert's first love.

Quotes edit see section history

• “Is it better not to have the dreams, the work, and then the desolation of uncompleted work? Perhaps, like Frédéric and Deslauriers, we should prefer the consolation of non-fulfilment: the planned visit to the brothel, the pleasure of anticipation, and then, years later, not the memory of deeds but the memory of past anticipations? Wouldn’t that keep it all cleaner and less painful?”

• “I don’t much care for coincidences. There’s something spooky about them: you sense momentarily what it must be like to live in an ordered, God-run universe, with Himself looking over your shoulder and helpfully dropping coarse hints about a cosmic plan. I prefer to feel that things are chaotic, free-wheeling, permanently as well as temporarily crazy - to feel the certainty of human ignorance, brutality and folly.”

• “France is the only country I know where drivers are warned about beetroot on the road: BETTERAVES, I once saw in a red warning triangle, with a picture of a car slipping out of control”

• “If you quite enjoy a writer’s work, if you turn the page approvingly yet don’t mind being interrupted, then you tend to like that author unthinkingly. Good chap, you assume. Sound fellow. They say he strangled an entire pack of Wolf Cubs and fed their bodies to a school of carp? Oh no, I’m sure he didn’t: sound fellow, good chap.But if you love a writer, if you depend upon the drip-feed of his intelligence, if you want to pursue him and find him - despite edicts to the contrary - then it’s impossible to know too much. You seek the vice as well. A pack of Wolf Cubs, eh? Was that twenty-seven or twenty-eight? And did he have their little scarves sewn up into a patchwork quilt? And is it true that as he ascended the scaffold he quoted from the Book of Jonah? And that he bequeathed his carp pond to the local Boy Scouts?”

• “I sometimes feel a residual bitterness that one of these defence counsel, when speaking for a true work of literature, did not build his act on simple defiance. (Is this book sexy? M'Lud, we bloody well hope so. Does it encourage adultery and attack marriage? Spot on, M'Lud, that's exactly what my client is trying to do. Is this book blasphemous? For Christ's sake, M'Lud, the matter's as clear as the loincloth on the Crucifixion. Put it this way, M'Lud: my client thinks that most of the values of the society in which he lives stink, and he hopes with this book to promote fornication, masturbation, adultery, the stoning of priests and, since we've temporarily got your attention, M'Lud, the suspension of corrupt judges by their earlobes. The defence rests its case.”

• “Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.”

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• Isn’t the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic?

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• The whole dream of democracy,’ he wrote, ‘is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie.’

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• ‘Happiness is like the pox. Catch it too soon, and it wrecks your constitution.’

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• ‘Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.’

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• Style is a function of theme. Style is not imposed on subject-matter, but arises from it. Style is truth to thought. The correct word, the true phrase, the perfect sentence are always ‘out there’ somewhere; the writer’s task is to locate them by whatever means he can.

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• What makes us randy for relics? Don’t we believe the words enough? Do we think the leavings of a life contain some ancillary truth?

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• The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonourably, foolishly, viciously. The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

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• ‘I am bothered by my tendency to metaphor, decidedly excessive. I am devoured by comparisons as one is by lice, and I spend my time doing nothing but squashing them.’

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• ‘To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness – though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.’

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• Ellen. My wife: someone I feel I understand less well than a foreign writer dead for a hundred years. Is this an aberration, or is it normal? Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.

  Highlighted by 4 Kindle customers

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Rouen
• Revue De Paris
• Trouville
• London
• England
• Sind
• Salammbô
• Mantes

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Julian Barnes (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Man Booker Prize (Finalist, 1984, shortlist)
• Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1985)
• New York Times Best Books of the Year (1985)
• Prix Médicis (France) (1986)
• Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy) (1988)
• Guardian 1000 (Comedy)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 823.914

Notes for Parents edit see section history

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Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( B ) › Barnes, Julian
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary

More Books Like This edit see section history