Blurb......... Geoffrey Braithwaite is a retired doctor haunted by
an obsession with the great French literary genius, Gustave Flaubert. As
Geoffrey investigates the mystery of the stuffed parrot Flaubert borrowed from
the Museum of Rouen to help research one of his novels, we learn an enormous
amount about the writer's work, family, lovers, thought processes, health and
obsessions. But we also gradually come to learn some important and shocking
details about Geoffrey himself.
Always a sucker for a smart
cover, and add in the fact that it had been enjoyed and praised by no less than
the likes of John Irving and Graham Greene, with a price tag of a whopping 30p
in whatever charity shop I was browsing about 10 years ago and it was pretty
much a given that I would be reading this sometime in the distant future.
After a previous start, stall,
stop attempt to read this some years ago, I reopened it with a new found determination
to read it start to finish and hopefully at the same time enjoy it.
Well in places it was okay,
amusing and informative. In other places it was dull and tedious and though it
is classed as a novel, it has a strange structure to it. One of the plus points
was it was relatively short!
I’ve found some detail out about
Gustave Flaubert that I previously didn’t know; a French author of the 19th
Century, who’s first published work – Madame Bovary - brought him and his
publisher up on immorality charges, of which he was acquitted. Flaubert is
regarded by some as one of the greatest novelists of Western Literature. He
never married, he took on average about five years or so on each book, plus he
at some time borrowed a stuffed parrot.
I haven’t been inspired to go and
seek out anything from Flaubert to form my own opinion on his value as a great exponent
of Western prose. Similarly neither have I been encouraged to seek out much
else that Barnes has penned, apart from his recent book - A Sense Of An Ending
- which I’ll get to sometime, though it might be another 10 years or so.
On reflection, it was probably a bit
better than a 2 from 5, but not quite a 3, but in the process of rounding up 3
from 5 it is.
As indicated earlier, I bought
this copy second-hand.
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