Synopses & Reviews
A kind of detective story, relating a cranky amateur scholar's search for the truth about Gustave Flaubert, and the obsession of this detective whose life seems to oddly mirror those of Flaubert's characters.
Review:
"This ingenious, lively, witty, and exceptionally entertaining novel is ostensibly the story of Geoffrey Braithwaite, an English physician and amateur of Flaubert, who investigates the art and life of the great French novelist. Imagine a book informed by the compulsiveness of Eric Ambler's A Coffin for Dimitrios, the artifice of Nabokov's Pale Fire, and the historical masquerade of Virginia Woolf's Orlando all blended into something very special, and you will have some idea of what Barnes' little masterpiece is like. Flaubert haunts every word and page of this often very funny and also very poignant meditation on art, love, history, and life." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
About the Author
Julian Barnes was born in Leicester in 1946 and educated in London and Oxford. He worked as a lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary, then as a journalist for the New Statesman, the Sunday Times and the Observer. He is the author of eight novels, a collection of essays, a book of short stories, and is the first Englishman to have won both the Prix Medicis and the Prix Femina. In 1988 he was made a Chevalier and in 1995 he became an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
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