#Flaubert's Parrot

[quotelr]

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. 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.

Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

[detournementsmineurs]

"A Parrot for Flaubert" necklace by Kevin Coates in gold, silver, black mother-of-pearl, iridescent glass, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, carnelian, citrine and amethyst (2012) and "Athene Noctua" brooch by Kevin Coates in gold, platinum, blue titanium and silver (1983) presented in “A History of Jewellery: Bedazzled (part 9: Contemporary Jewellery 1960s into the 21st Century)” by Beatriz Chadour-Sampson - International Jewellery Historian and Author - for the V&A Academy online, april 2024.

[onenakedfarmer]

JULIAN BARNES Flaubert's Parrot

Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence. Art is not a brassiére. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiére is the French for life-jacket.

[northwest-by-a-train]

🦜

Flaubert's A Simple Heart is the best, most heartbreaking use of a parrot in all of literature. 40 pages and it'll haunt you forevermore.

[grandhotelabyss]

Should I read Defoe — or rather, how might one approach Defoe?

I've only read Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders myself. I was going to read Journal of a Plague Year during the pandemic, but after I read the Decameron I was plagued out. Anyway, should you? Insofar as anyone should read anything, you should read Robinson Crusoe because it's a foundational myth of modern western culture.

(Moll Flanders is only "required reading" if you have more specialized interests: class, gender, and the development of novelistic realism. The next one I need to read in that vein is Roxana. I was assigned Moll Flanders twice in college. Once was in a seminar on literary realism the showstopper of which was Barthes's S/Z. The second time was in a class on race and gender in the 18th century alongside Robinson Crusoe and Roxana, and the narratives of Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince. But by the time we finished the first two Defoe novels, the professor said, "That's enough of that," and told us to skip Roxana. Maybe I shouldn't have, but I did.)

Robinson Crusoe is neither long (if you discount the sequels, which most people do) nor all that difficult to read; it's just a bit dull by present standards. (Don't hesitate to get an edition with modernized spelling and capitalization—no use making yourself crazy with 18th-century orthography.) Crusoe's inner debates about theology, the "spiritual autobiography" elements of the novel, remain utterly fascinating, in my opinion. Also, the style of precise, concrete, and evocative realism nascent in Defoe's descriptive passages was, almost in spite of the author, something new in literature, as Virginia Woolf reminds us:

If you are Defoe, certainly to describe the fact is enough; for the fact is the right fact. By means of this genius for fact Defoe achieves effects that are beyond any but the great masters of descriptive prose. He has only to say a word or two about "the grey of the morning" to paint vividly a windy dawn. A sense of desolation and of the deaths of many men is conveyed by remarking in the most prosaic way in the world, "I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows". When at last he exclaims, "Then to see how like a king I din'd too all alone, attended by my servants"—his parrot and his dog and his two cats, we cannot help but feel that all humanity is on a desert island alone—though Defoe at once informs us, for he has a way of snubbing off our enthusiasms, that the cats were not the same cats that had come in the ship. Both of those were dead; these cats were new cats, and as a matter of fact cats became very troublesome before long from their fecundity, whereas dogs, oddly enough, did not breed at all.

Thus Defoe, by reiterating that nothing but a plain earthenware pot stands in the foreground, persuades us to see remote islands and the solitudes of the human soul. By believing fixedly in the solidity of the pot and its earthiness, he has subdued every other element to his design; he has roped the whole universe into harmony. And is there any reason, we ask as we shut the book, why the perspective that a plain earthenware pot exacts should not satisfy us as completely, once we grasp it, as man himself in all his sublimity standing against a background of broken mountains and tumbling oceans with stars flaming in the sky?

All three of the major Anglophone modernist novelists—Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner—revered Defoe. Frank Budgen reported that Defoe was one of the only four authors Joyce had read in their entirety (the other three were Ibsen, Flaubert, and Ben Jonson). Faulkner had this rather florid and obscene thing to say about Moll Flanders, more the woman than the novel, though the occasion was an early letter in which he claimed that Moll Flanders was the second book he most wished he'd written, after Moby-Dick (the third was A. A. Milne's When We Were Very Young, where Winnie the Pooh makes his debut):

Yet, when I remember Moll Flanders and all her teaming and rich fecundity like a market-place where all that had survived up to that time must bide and pass…

[julianandsandy]

for the book ask game - 3, 7, 18 and 25!! <3

Did consuming any piece of media inspire you to pick up the book? How did it compare? 

I don't really think so! I don't watch much TV or many films and my reading tends to influence my media consumption rather than the other way round

Any old favorites let you down? 

I usually like Sarah Moss but The Tidal Zone was overlong and didn't hold my interest as much as her others have. I've read a fair bit by Julian Barnes without necessarily loving any of it, but Flaubert's Parrot didn't really connect with me and was experimental in a way that now feels dated (it came out in the 80s)

Some books you bought this year

Too many! 🤫 Some highlights include Thom Gunn's letters, Nabokov's The Gift, the catalogue from the Marina Abramovic at the Royal Academy, and all of Derek Jarman's diaries

If you had to give a TEDTalk on a book you read this year, for better or worse, which would it be?

Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight - a fascinating fictional approach to biography and one of the most heartbreaking closing paragraphs I've ever read, and I think I'd have so much to say about the concept of the fictional novelist

Thank you, lovely! ☺️

[xlntwtch2]

from katerinaperez.com ...

dated january 23, 2014

“Coates is Britain’s leading artist-goldsmith, with a renaissance imagination and an ingenuity to match” – The TIMES

Having read the quotes above one would have a natural desire to find out more about Kevin Coates and see his magical precious objects and jewellery with their own eyes. Starting from the 17th of January until the 30th of March, this all is possible: The Ashmolean museum in Oxford holds a special show of Dr Kevin Coates’ work called “A Bestiary of  Jewels”.

It is an fascinating project representing a “Bestiary” of sculptural jewels in a poetic elaboration of the bizarre medieval encyclopaedias known as Bestiaries. Historically they assembled lore and myth about animals and now Kevin Coates created his own additions to the book: A Parrot for Flaubert; A Starling for Mozart; A Rhinoceros for Kaendler; and A Dodo for Mr. Dodgson. Crucially, he has paired a series of individual creatures with their significant human, where the jewel is mounted in a modelled and painted Bestiary ‘page’...."

‘Entry of the Queen of Night’ (Mozart series)

Tiara/Neckpiece by Kevin Coates, 1996 Yellow gold, white gold, sulphided and patinated silver, carved and inlaid grey moonstone, fire opal, varigated and white mother-of-pearl, gold leaf.

[nondualreality]

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

[memyselfmemed]

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

[nicethingsinuglyhandwriting]

This search is a sign of love, I maintain // Julian Barnes.

[cyber-opuscule]

Here’s some of the books I’m considering to reread:

- The Hobbit/LotR/Silmarillion (these are among the oldest since I’ve read them, as I read them all in grades 10 and 11)

- Neuromancer

- Cat’s Cradle/Breakfast of Champions/Slaughter-House Five

- Jonathan Livingston Seagull

- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

- Thus Spoke Zarathustra/Beyond Good and Evil

- We (Yevgeny Zamyatin)

- The Master and Margarita

- The Myth of Sisyphus

- In Praise of Folly

- White Noise/Underworld (though I’m less certain about that second one, since it’s nearly 900 pages long)

- Stone Angel/A Jest of God (I read both while still under effects of whatever drugs I was on after getting my wisdom teeth teeth pulled, so I never remembered anything about them other than loving them)

- Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy

- Acadie Rock/Cri de terre/La Sagouine (three Acadian classics)

- Chatterton/Milton in America

- Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

- Flaubert’s Parrot

- The Periodic Table (Primo Levi)

- The Comfortable Pew/The Smug Minority (Pierre Berton)

- Histoire d’une langue: le français/The Origins and Development of the English Language (two books on the history of English and French that were incredibly eye-opening)

- Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass/The Story of Sylvie and Bruno

- The Castle of Otranto

- Dubliners/A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (and then maybe FINALLY follow these up with Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake)

- Calvin and Hobbes (for the longest time, I would reread these every year, usually around Christmas, but it’s been since before I had kids that I’ve done so)

Lately, I’ve been getting the urge to reread some of my favourite books, stuff I read back in middle and high school and university. It suddenly struck me that these would be books I read between 20 to 30 years ago. I guess it might be interesting to see if I’d enjoy them now as much as I did back then.

[onenakedfarmer]

JULIAN BARNES Flaubert's Parrot

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. 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.

[books0977]

Flaubert's Parrot. Julian Barnes. London: Jonathan Cape, 1984. First edition. Original dust jacket. 

Flaubert's Parrot deals with Flaubert, parrots, bears and railways; with our sense of the past and our sense of abroad; with France and England, life and art, sex and death, George Sand and Louise Colet, aesthetics and redcurrant jam; and with its enigmatic narrator, a retired English doctor, whose life and secrets are slowly revealed.

[macrolit]

The Razor’s Edge, W. Somerset Maugham Flaubert’s Parrot and Levels of Life, Julian Barnes