Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes6/1/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Perrin is a member of Oulipo, and his project is very Oulipian: it lists, in alphabetical order, every single word, number and punctuation mark that occurs in the 1873 Charpentier edition of the novel. One of the more arcane items of Flaubertiana is Ambroise Perrin’s Madame Bovary dans l’ordre (2012). Obsessionįlaubert is a writer who, more than most, can provoke obsessive devotion and obsessive behaviour. But something remained from my dutiful reading, if only a willingness to return to the author at a future date. I doubt I understood the scene in the closed cab, let alone the metonymic burst of white paper shooting from the window at its shrouded climax. The book was too subtle for me, of course, and I failed to find it at all erotic. Back then, their classics were distinguished by the overall jacket colour: green for France, red for Russia, olive-green for Germany, purple and brown for the Classical world, and so on. France, a married woman, adultery: as we didn’t say then, what’s not to like? I read the novel in its Penguin translation. ![]() It still had the reputation of being a hot book – after all, it had been prosecuted for ‘outraging public morals’ when it first appeared serially in the Revue de Paris. An iconoclastic English master, just down from Cambridge, had given us a reading list which to our surprise contained foreign authors. ![]()
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