Flaubert's Parrot

by Julian Barnes

What makes us randy for relics?

Isn’t the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic?

Is it better not to have the dreams, the work, and then the desolation of uncompleted work? Perhaps, like Frédéric and Deslauriers, we should prefer the consolation of non-fulfilment: the planned visit to the brothel, the pleasure of anticipation, and then, years later, not the memory of deeds but the memory of past anticipations? Wouldn’t that keep it all cleaner and less painful?

Deep within me there is a radical, intimate, bitter and incessant boredom which prevents me from enjoying anything and which smothers my soul.

It’s true that many things infuriate me. The day I stop being indignant I shall fall flat on my face, like a doll when you take away its prop.

Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so manifest – disdain for Beauty, execration of literature. I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.

I’d ban coincidences, if I were a dictator of fiction.

Whereas the common but passionate reader is allowed to forget; he can go away, be unfaithful with other writers, come back and be entranced again. Domesticity need never intrude on the relationship; it may be sporadic, but when there it is always intense.

signify? The whole dream of democracy,’ he wrote, ‘is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie.

Books are not life, however much we might prefer it if they were.

Do you know what Nabokov said about adultery in his lecture on Madame Bovary? He said it was ‘a most conventional way to rise above the conventional

The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.

The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree.

‘It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough actually to father them.

A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.

It’s easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren’t writers, and very little harm comes to them.

What did he learn instead? Instead he learned that life is not a choice between murdering your way to the throne or slopping back in a sty; that there are swinish kings and regal hogs; that the king may envy the pig; and that the possibilities of the not-life will always change tormentingly to fit the particular embarrassments of the lived life.

Perhaps some final confirmation that mankind itself was ineradicably corrupt, that life was indeed just a gaudy nightmare in the head of an imbecile?

That’s the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don’t, but between those who want to know everything and those who don’t. This search is a sign of love, I maintain.

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonourably, foolishly, viciously.

And besides, you do not look, you do not choose, do you? You are chosen; you are elected into love by a secret ballot against which there is no appeal.

‘To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness – though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.

Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.