Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot

˝ Flaubert's Parrot is a massive lumber room of detail about the great man: in it we learn an enormous amount about his life, family, lovers, thought processes, health and obsessions. But the voice that tells us all this is gradually revealed to be itself in the grip of an obsession. The voice is that of Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired doctor with a nagging need to rationalise his wife's suicide, and a more obscure compulsion to anatomise the processes of human identiry. Julian Barnes' success seems assured with this stunning combination of French provincial wisdom and tortured British self-analysis. The insinuating Barnesian sryle, weaving feathers of disparate fact into a parrot's plumage of riches and a croak of human anguish, should stop a few people in their tracks' Books and Bookmen Julian Barnes' wry and graceful book, part novel, part stealthy literary criticism, traces the marks - Flaubert made on a forgetting world. The writing is unfailingly sharp and often very funny, and among the best prose I have read in years' Sunday Times Flaubert's Parrot was shortlisted for the Booker McConnell Prize in 1984 and won the 1985 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.˝