Flaubert's Parrot

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Flaubert's Parrot

First edition cover
Author	Julian Barnes
Country	England
Language	English
Publisher	Jonathan Cape
Publication date	1984
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	190 pp
ISBN	0-7475-1347-3
OCLC	27415629

Flaubert's Parrot is a novel by Julian Barnes that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984^[1] and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize the following year.^[2] The novel recites amateur Gustave Flaubert expert Geoffrey Braithwaite's musings on his subject's life, and his own, as he looks for a stuffed parrot that inspired the great author.

Plot summary[]

The novel follows Geoffrey Braithwaite, a widowed, retired English doctor, visiting France. While visiting sites related to Flaubert, Geoffrey discovers two museums claiming to display the stuffed parrot which sat atop Flaubert's writing desk for a brief period while he wrote Un Coeur Simple. While trying to identify which is authentic, Braithwaite learns that Flaubert's parrot could be any one of fifty ("Une cinquantaine de perroquets!", p. 187) that had been held in the collection of the municipal museum.

Although the narrative is mostly about tracking down the parrot, many chapters focus on Flaubert's love life .

Themes[]

One of the central themes of the novel is subjectivism. The novel provides three sequential chronologies of Flaubert's life: the first is optimistic (citing his successes, conquests, etc.), the second is negative (citing the deaths of his friends/lovers, his failures, illnesses etc.) and the third compiles quotations written by Flaubert in his journal at various points in his life. The attempts to find the real Flaubert mirror the attempt to find his parrot, i.e. apparent futility.

References[]

External links[]

• Julian Barnes discusses Flaubert's Parrot on the BBC World Book Club
• Julian Barnes Website (Flaubert's Parrot), with extensive bibliography of translations and scholarly articles.

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