He attempts to ferret out the dimensions of the Rouen cab in which Emma Bovary was seduced, the railway schedules that got Flaubert and his mistress to their trysts at the H^otel du Grand Cerf in Mantes (halfway between Rouen and Paris), and the true identity of that stuffed parrot Flaubert borrowed from the Rouen museum and placed on his desk while he was writing ''A Simple Heart.''īraithwaite's immersion in the life of a past writer may remind us of Frederic Moreau, hero of Flaubert's ''Sentimental Education,'' who finds serenity in writing history because, as Flaubert puts it, ''By immersing himself in the personality of others, he forgot his own, which is perhaps the only way not to suffer from it.'' For we discover, as we go along, that Braithwaite is suffering from his wife's repeated betrayals followed by her suicide, a personal drama that the novel almost too discreetly writes in the margins of Braithwaite's all-consuming pursuit of Flaubert. The obsession belongs to the narrator of the novel, one Geoffrey Braithwaite, a cranky but somewhat endearing English doctor in his 60's who spends his considerable leisure time pursuing trivia concerning his great man. ''Flaubert's Parrot'' is high literary entertainment.

The result is a splendid hybrid of a novel, part biography, part fiction, part literary criticism, the whole carried off with great brio. Rather, he has appropriately given us the story of an obsession with Flaubert.

Barnes hasn't written this novel directly or simply. The correspondence seems to invite the creation of a supplementary novel with Flaubert, no longer shackled to his doctrine of ''impersonality'' in art, as its hero.

The temptation in fact seems hard to resist, since the austere image of Flaubert - the hermit of Croisset who sacrificed living to his unending quest for style, the father of modernism who wished most of all to write ''a book about nothing'' - is so belied by what we know of the man and his rich inner life.īehind the magnificent and melancholy novels, as every lover of Flaubert knows, stands one of the richest and most entertaining of all correspondences: witty, iconoclastic, bracingly profane, unbuttoned and often explosive - so different from the carefully controlled novels. Gustave Flaubert has been the subject of a nearly obsessive number of biographies and critical studies, including Jean-Paul Sartre's outsized recreation of the writer's psychic life in ''The Family Idiot.'' Now Julian Barnes, a British novelist and journalist, has succumbed to the temptation to make Flaubert the central figure in a novel.

Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes