This was not my cup of tea. It took me FOREVER to read, but it must not be very popular because I checked it out multiple times. Usually, there are people waiting in line and I cannot renew it!
Flaubert was a dreamer and a lost soul, but I have read Madame Bovary, and the guy could write!
Sophisticated literary inventions are seldom as charming as this one, an intricately composed but inviting exploration of the nature of desire. The intricacy of the composition comes from Julian Barnes’s playful orchestration of a variety of styles, combining fiction with literary criticism, biography, diversions scholarly and reflective, a chronology, even a mock exam; the charm comes from the unfailing tunefulness of his sentences—they are shaped with a confidence, clarity, and concentrated energy that give great pleasure. With digressive progress, Barnes leads us on a delightfully comic pursuit of large questions: Is love, like art, finally unknowable, except in the imaginative experience of it? Is memory itself an art, in which we shape, in story, our subjectivity? Filled with literary fun of a very high order, Flaubert’s Parrot is a seriously delicious confection.
No comments:
Post a Comment