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Flaubert's Parrot

Julian Barnes

Start date: February 1, 2015

Finish date: February 28, 2015

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Sep 22, 2021 Rosemary rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-books

I went into this not expecting it to be literally about Gustave Flaubert and a parrot, but it is. Or anyway it's about Flaubert, and there is a parrot - in fact, several. The narrator of this novel, the widowed doctor Geoffrey Braithwaite, is investigating the life of Flaubert, and so we have a kind of literary biography at second hand.

I did enjoy most of this but wasn't wowed by it as I see some of my friends were. I found it hard to care about Braithwaite, and it didn’t awaken in me any press ...more

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Oct 14, 2018 Jamie Barringer (Ravenmount) rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, 1001-books-challenge, 2018

This novel is about a biographer who visits Rouen to explore museums dedicated to Gustave Flaubert. He discovers that two different museums have a stuffed parrot on display, and both claim they have THE parrot Flaubert had on his desk for a few weeks while writing about a parrot. The writer becomes obsessed with tracking down the truth about which parrot Flaubert had on his desk.
The novel explores Flaubert's life, and in my opinion is a cheap trick to con novel-readers into reading and buying a ...more

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Sep 08, 2019 Nancy rated it really liked it

Shelves: 1001-books, owned, 1001-challenge

"Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own." ...more

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