Flaubert's Parrot

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FLAUBERT'S PARROT ^JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot is a massive lumber room of detail about the great man: in it we learn an enormous amount about his life, family, lovers, thought processes, health and obsessions. But the voice that tells us all this is gradually revealed to be itself in the grip of an obsession. The voice is that of Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired doctor with a nagging need to rationalise his wife's suicide, and a more obscure compulsion to anatomise the processes of human identity. Julian Barnes' success seems assured with this stunning combination of French provincial wisdom and tortured British self-analysis. The insinuating Bamesian style, weaving feathers of disparate fact into a parrot's plumage of riches and a croak of human anguish, should stop a few people in their tracks.' BOOKS AND BOOKMEN
'Julian Barnes' wry and graceful book, part novel, part stealthy literary criticism, traces the marks Flaubert... Tovább

Fülszöveg

' ; / i V ¦ I', i I i ¦ i' : ' - ¦ !. . i U 1 ' ,
FLAUBERT'S PARROT ^JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot is a massive lumber room of detail about the great man: in it we learn an enormous amount about his life, family, lovers, thought processes, health and obsessions. But the voice that tells us all this is gradually revealed to be itself in the grip of an obsession. The voice is that of Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired doctor with a nagging need to rationalise his wife's suicide, and a more obscure compulsion to anatomise the processes of human identity. Julian Barnes' success seems assured with this stunning combination of French provincial wisdom and tortured British self-analysis. The insinuating Bamesian style, weaving feathers of disparate fact into a parrot's plumage of riches and a croak of human anguish, should stop a few people in their tracks.' BOOKS AND BOOKMEN
'Julian Barnes' wry and graceful book, part novel, part stealthy literary criticism, traces the marks Flaubert made on a forgetting world. The writing is unfailingly sharp and often very funny, and among the best prose 1 have read in years.' THE SUNDAY TIMES
'Rich in parody and parrotry, using Flaubert's words and free associations from them to write biography in subversive form, this book is a great success, humane and generous, full of insight and wit, rich and even prodigal in its verbal inventiveness: a book Flaubert would have scorned to write, a book well worth writing.' NEWYORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
'Here is a novel designed by a dissident novelist in his refusal to conform. He sparkles and speculates about life, death, love, morality, sex, writing and a hundred matters. Quite wonderful.' THE SPECTATOR
'Flaubert's Parrot is an extraordinarily artful mix of tomfoolery and high seriousness. It works as literary detection, literary criticism and literaiy j
experiment. In an age which insists that every problem has an economic, political or technological solution, Barnes has the courage and good humour to | remind us that there are questions to which there are no answers.' i
TLS ?
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Flaubert's Parroi was shordisted for the Booker McConnell Prize in 1984 and won g the 1985 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. ^ Vissza