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)
Synopsis
BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE - The literary detective story of a retired doctor who is obsessed with the 19th century French author Flaubert--and with tracking down a stuffed parrot that once inspired him - From the internationally bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending
Julian Barnes playfully combines a detective story with a character study of its detective, embedded in a brilliant riff on literary genius.
A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert's Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour de force of seductive originality.
About the Author
Born in Leicester in 1946, Julian Barnes is the author of nine novels, a book of stories, and a collection of essays. He has won both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Fémina, and in 1988 was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London.