July 2023. Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
1984, Vintage International, 204 pages. Written in English, read in English.
One would assume that if Gustave Flaubert was tasked with writing somebody else’s biography — say, his lover Louise Colet, or his second mother, George Sand — there would be as much of himself in the biography as the subject of the work. That is to say, every aspect of the life of the person who the biography would have been written about, will be told from the prism of Flaubert’s view. It is fitting, therefore, that Barnes begins the biography of Flaubert not in the classical manner — with his birth and his upbringing — but with his own search for the correct parrot which Flaubert has used as inspiration when writing Un Coeur Simple.
One then peruses the book cover again and finds two strange words for a subtitle: A novel. It is not even Barnes who is writing this biography, then, but a fictional character, named Geoffrey Braithwaite, driven by Barnes to collect and describe the chronicles of the old man of letters. But given that the book is a novel — a fiction — is the biography also a fiction? Or are all of its details researched carefully and are true? We don’t know. And it doesn’t matter. Because Flaubert’s Parrot takes on a new form of a book — something that is an amalgam of a novel, a biography, a travel book, a research paper, and none of these, all at the same time.
The novel has set, roughly, the two points with which a common biography is equipped. His birth is mentioned somewhere in the beginning; his death mentioned somewhere near the end. In between, though, the biography — written in Braithwaite’s view — is collected in peculiar and novel ways — lists, observations on themes, whole chapters written from the point of view of one of the other characters in the play of Flaubert’s life. There is as much of the search for new details to put in the biography — the biographer’s tale, as it were — as the details pertaining to Flaubert’s life. Even the components of a biography which are more common to find — such as a detailed chronology at the beginning of the book — are written with a very different skew. The chronology at the beginning of this book appears thrice — once, a rundown of all of the accomplishments and celebrations of Flaubert’s life; the second time, a rundown of all of the miseries and dire events of Flaubert’s life; and the third time, a match of a fitting quote from Flaubert’s works for each of the relevant years.
As the novel progresses we can find more details about the biographer himself. He is a widower whose wife, Ellen (begins with an E — it’s important), has also committed suicide. He tries to find meaning in that decision through the meaning that he tries to find in Flaubert’s life and his works. He tries to accomplish a truly unique finding that has not been discovered in any of Flaubert’s many previous biographies — a definite answer regarding the stuffed parrot that Flaubert had on his desk for inspiration when writing Un Coeur Simple — was it the one that is displayed in the museum dedicated to Flaubert that was once his father’s hospital? Was it the one that is displayed in another Flaubert museum in Rouen? Will we find out? Does it matter?
The August 2023 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens.
