FLAUBERT'S PARROT
LITERATURE/FICTION
''A lot of rather peculiar fun... a masterly novel... artfully artless.'' - Washington Post Book World
Which of two stuffed parrots was the inspiration for one of Flaubert's greatest stories? Why did the master keep changing the color of Emma Bovary's eyes? And why should these minutiae matter so much to Geoffrey Braithwaite, the crankily erudite doctor who is the narrator of this tour de force of style and imagination?
In Flaubert's Parrot, Julian Barnes, who has been compared with writers such as Joyce and Calvino, spins out a multiple mystery, an exuberant metafictional inquiry into the ways in which art mirrors life and then turns around to shape it; a look at the perverse autopsies that readers perform on books and lovers perform on their beloved; and a piercing glimpse at the nature of obsession and betrayal, both scholarly and romantic.
''Simultaneously haunting and funny... Possibly the wittiest anti-novel since Nabokov's Pale Fire. '' -Boston Globe
By the author of Talking It Over and A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters