Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot

It was a small room, perhaps eight feet by ten, with windows on the right and shelves running away to the left. Despite a few ceiling lights, it remained quite dark, this burial vault on the top floor. Though it wasn’t, I suppose, altogether a tomb: some of these creatures would be taken out again into the daylight, and allowed to replace moth-eaten or unfashionable colleagues. So it was an ambivalent room, half-morgue and half-purgatory. It had an uncertain smell, too: somewhere between a surgery and a hardware shop.

Everywhere I looked there were birds. Shelf after shelf of birds, each one covered in a sprinkling of white pesticide. I was directed to the third aisle. I pushed carefully between the shelves and then looked up at a slight angle. There, standing in a line, were the Amazonian parrots. Of the original fifty only three remained. Any gaudiness in their colouring had been dimmed by the dusting of pesticide which lay over them. They gazed at me like three quizzical, sharp-eyed, dandruff-ridden, dishonourable old men. They did look – I had to admit it – a little cranky. I stared at them for a minute or so, and then dodged away.

Perhaps it was one of them.

“Witty and dazzling!”

“ Flaubert’s Parrot is a book that by turns engages, impresses and finally bowls you over with its sharpness, wit and dazzling originality.”

“A gem: an unashamed literary novel that is also unashamed to be readable, and broadly entertaining. Bravo!”

“Brilliant and witty.”

“[ Flaubert’s Parrot ] tackles serious concepts with verve. Like the eponymous bird it’s funny but has much to say… witty and playful.”

“Delightful and enriching… a book to revel in!”

“A small miracle of a novel that tantalizes and charms.”

“The pleasure in this book lies in the way Barnes circulates among his historical and imaginary characters and in his agile writing strategies.”

“What a good book Julian Barnes has written!… So clever and so sensitive at once.”

“A wonderful reading experience.”

“Barnes speak to anyone who loves the possibilities of literature.”

“In this free-form examination of the great French novelist’s life and artistic practice, amateur scholarship, cranky partisanship, and a passionate effort at self-understanding are amusingly assembled into a resonant literary comedy.”

“It is a cranky, brilliant book.”

Born in Leicester, England, in 1946, Julian Barnes is the author of nine novels, a book of stories, and collections of essays. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. In France he is the only writer to have won both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Fémina, and in 1988 he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London.

ARTHUR & GEORGE

THE LEMON TABLE

SOMETHING TO DECLARE

LOVE, ETC.

ENGLAND, ENGLAND

CROSS CHANNEL

LETTERS FROM LONDON

THE PORCUPINE

TALKING IT OVER

A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 10½ CHAPTERS

STARING AT THE SUN

BEFORE SHE MET ME

METROLAND

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, DECEMBER 1990

Copyright © 1984 by Julian Barnes

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, Ltd., London, in 1984 and in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1985.

“Flaubert’s Parrot” was first published in the London Review of Books , and “Emma Bovary’s Eyes” first appeared in an edited form in Granta .

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barnes, Julian.

Flaubert’s parrot/Julian Barnes—1st Vintage international ed.

p. cm.—(Vintage international)

eISBN: 978-0-307-79785-8

1. Flaubert, Gustave, 1821–1880, in fiction, drama, poetry, etc. I. Title.

PR6052.A6657F56 1990

823’.914—dc20 90-50162

CIP

Author photo copyright © Miriam Berkley

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