Guardian Newspaper 1000 Novels discussion

In January we will be reading Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes for our Comedy category - who's in?

I am.

Yep, hoping to get to this later in the month.

Finished it yesterday - I think I've read this about three times before over the years, but I don't think I've read it this century. This time, I felt there was more Flaubert minutiae than I remembered and less of Braithwaite's personal feelings and grief breaking through, but I still gave it 5 stars, because at this point Barnes wrote about Love better than anyone in his generation.

In another of this books, "A History of the World in 10 and a Half Chapters" in the "half chapter" Barnes the author is in bed next to his sleeping wife and writes something like (I paraphrase because the book is in another room and on the top shelf of a bookcase - but the gist has stayed with me for 30 years) that"the trouble with the world is that the heart is not heart-shaped" meaning that love is messy and sticky and visceral and painful and joyous and real, and not a heart emoji (not that emojis were anything at all back then, even wingdings weren't.

Anyway, here's my review (there's no spoilers, I don't think).

**************

Yes, it gets Five Stars, but largely for one chapter: chapter 13, 'Pure Story'. At this point in the 80s few people wrote about love, its loss, its absence, its ordinariness, its sublimity as well as Julian Barnes. And in this particular chapter, in which the narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, tells the reader about his wife and her life and death and his grief and his dealing with it, is among the greatest dozen pages of literature I've read.

" 'It may seem bad, Geoffrey, but you'll come out of it. I'm not taking your grief lightly; it's just that I've seen enough of life to know that you'll come out of it.' The words you've said yourself while scribbling a prescription (No, Mrs Blank, you could take them all and they wouldn't kill you). And you do come out of it, that's true. After a year, after five. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil slick. You are tarred and feathered for life."

Beyond this chapter, I think there's a little too much Flaubert minutiae (I suppose the clue's in the title) and less about Geoffrey's private life than I'd ideally like, but it's a short book and it's all well written, with Geoffrey and engaging host, distracting himself with the tiny details of another's life from the holes in his own, and Chapter 13 is worth the price of a couple of days reading all by itself.

did anybody else finish this one...?