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julian barnes
Julian Barnes is the author of fourteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Booker Prize. He has also written three books of short stories, and several works of non-fiction, including Nothing to be Frightened Of and the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life. In 2017 he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur.
www.julianbarnes.com
fiction
Metroland
Before She Met Me Staring at the Sun
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters Talking it Over The Porcupine Cross Channel England, England
Love, etc
The Lemon Table Arthur & George Pulse
The Sense of an Ending The Noise of Time
The Only Story Elizabeth Finch
non-fiction
Letters from London 1990–1995 Something to Declare
The Pedant in the Kitchen
Nothing to be Frightened Of Through the Window Levels of Life
Keeping an Eye Open
The Man in the Red Coat
translation
In the Land of Pain by Alphonse Daudet
julian barnes FLAUBERT’S PARROT
W it H an intro D uction by t H e aut H or
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Copyright © Julian Barnes 1984 Introduction copyright © Julian Barnes 2025
Julian Barnes has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1984 This paperback first published in Vintage Classics in 2025
‘Flaubert’s Parrot’ was first published in the London Review of Books, and ‘Emma Bovary’s Eyes’ first appeared, in an edited form, in Granta
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Flaubert’s Parrot at 40
Flaubert’s Parrot at 40
In mid-September 1984, my wife and I spent two weeks in what could still just be called La France Profonde. The Cantal is hilly, lush and green, very green. This is because it rains much of the time. There are long verdant valleys which the British would turn into golf courses; here they are left for cows and goats. Rightly is it called le pays vert. It felt and was far away from literary London; also, chillier than we had expected for the time of year, so in our rented gîte we built big log fires, wrapped ourselves in blankets and sat reading. I was on my first Anita Brookner novel, Hotel du Lac, while my wife was reading an early finished copy of my third novel, Flaubert’s Parrot, due to be published in a few weeks’ time. At seven o’clock one evening I was in the middle of cooking a rabbit stew when Mme Lamouroux, the owner of the property, arrived with steel teeth and inquisitive eyes all gleaming. She was bearing a telegram. I couldn’t think what it might be about, nor how anyone could have found us in this remote spot; but in any case was unwilling to satisfy Madame’s curiosity. After she had reluctantly departed, I opened the small blue item, which was folded into a size of roughly one inch by three: a petit bleu, perhaps, like that which famously brought down Dreyfus. It informed me that I had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Unsurprisingly, it was hard to sleep that night. My wife, also wide awake, practised her parrot imitations (‘Who’s a clever boy?’ and so on) with a view to doing them on television at the official dinner.
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It was, though I didn’t yet realise it, not just a key moment in my career, but one which taught me a lot about various things: about writing and reading and literary life; also about hubris and magnanimity. To get the hubris out of the way first: the shortlisted writers were J. G. Ballard, me, Anita Brookner, Anita Desai, Penelope Lively and David Lodge. I determined not to read the other four contenders and, holding up my copy of Hotel du Lac, said to my wife, ‘Well, I shan’t win, but I shan’t lose to this.’ Four weeks later, I lost to Hotel du Lac.
The dinner itself was a strange, almost hallucinatory affair. A week before, I had developed a paralysing pain in the left side of my neck, plus head and jaw and teeth; always there, nagging, but sometimes, especially at night, bursting out gleefully. Strain, no doubt, I assumed; though in fact it turned out to be an abscessed tooth. So I sat there, doped to the eyeballs, certain that I was going to win (I am sure all shortlistees, even those in full health and sanity, share the same necessary delusion as they sit through the hours in ignorance). But no, it turned out to be Anita Brookner instead. She accepted the cheque, went to the microphone and, referencing her other life as an art historian, began, ‘Normally, when I stand here, I talk for fifty minutes’ – perfect pause – ‘with slides.’ She and I shared a publisher, Liz Calder, who told me that when she had telephoned Anita to break the news of her shortlisting, the novelist had replied, ‘I think I shall go out and get a pair of shoes resoled. That will help me keep my feet on the ground.’ She was always impressively poised and witty. The rest of the evening got weirder. Two of the judges came up to me separately. The first gushed, ‘Loved the book, marvellous, absolutely smashing. Sorry.’ (As if she had somehow been solely responsible for my not winning.) The second was a genial Welsh MP, who said, ‘I’d never heard of this Flaubert fellow before, but after reading your novel I went out and ordered all his books in paperback.’ He also said that he was deeply moved by the discovery that Geoffrey Braithwaite, the novel’s main character, ‘really loved’ his wife, and checked with me that this was the case. (All of which was gratifying, though it left me wondering if, say, there had ever been a judge on a music prize who had never heard of Beethoven.) And then there was the novelist Malcolm Bradbury, whom I had met briefly for the first time earlier in the evening. He came up, threw an unwelcome arm around my shoulder, and said, ‘I don’t xiv
think you should have won, but I don’t think you should have lost to that book.’
Which leads straight into magnanimity. A few days before the dinner, Anita Brookner (whom by this time I had met at a bookshop event for three of those shortlisted) wrote me a note in which she said, ‘I think you will win – and you should.’ I imagine such a communication to be very rare, if not unique, in the history of the Booker Prize, or indeed of any literary prize. It was the perfect rebuke (unaware, and therefore the more perfect) to my initial hubris. And I was happy, and proud, that she and I became firm friends from that year until the day of her death.
There were some interesting, and gratifying, local reactions: my parents had been somewhat wary of my first two novels, let alone my first two pseudonymous thrillers, but with the success of the Parrot – backed up by my photograph appearing on the front page of The Times – they became convinced that I might actually, after all, be a real writer. (I thought the same, but only later.) The book sold far better than my previous novels; it featured on several bestseller lists; and then it began to sell into translation. Beginning, naturally, with France. The typescript had been sent to two publishers, Calmann-Lévy and Stock, who had both made offers. What did I think, my agent asked. I knew what I thought, because Calmann-Lévy was the descendant firm of Michel Lévy Frères, who had been the first publishers of Madame Bovary, Salammbô and L’Éducation sentimentale. It might seem that my choice was easily made, and it was, but not in the way you might expect. Flaubert’s letters are filled with complaints about the tight-fistedness and arrogance of Michel Lévy. Nor were these just routine literary whingeings. Flaubert was outraged that Lévy thought he had the right to make comments on the novelist’s text. This was viewed as gross impertinence: the only task of a publisher, in Flaubert’s opinion, was to receive the manuscript and print it without inspection or comment, while paying more money than they wanted to. So, in an act of distant cross-Channel loyalty and revenge, I withdrew my typescript from Calmann-Lévy, and chose Stock instead.
A writer needs three things for success: talent, hard work, and luck. My luck came in two parts: first, in having Liz Calder as my publisher for
my early books; and secondly, in the chance of the times. In the early 1980s, British literary fiction gradually, and then suddenly, became sexy. The Booker Prize helped, and so did the Best of Young British Novelists promotion, which started in 1983. Out of the twenty of us on the list, eighteen were lined up before Lord Snowdon’s camera for the Sunday Times colour magazine (Salman Rushdie had business elsewhere, while Alan Judd didn’t want to show his face because he supposedly was, or had been, or might once have been, a spy). Writers of literary fiction were no longer expected to live in burrows, emerging every two or three years to deliver a typescript smelling of must and acorns. They became rather newsworthy. All of which meant that advances started to go up, sometimes considerably. Also, that we were getting translated. When I first started going into French bookshops in the 1960s, there was only one real paperback list: Livre de Poche. And in all their thousands of titles, there were only two British writers: Lawrence Durrell, which seemed fair enough, and Charles Morgan, for whom the French had an inexplicable yen. When Le Perroquet de Flaubert was about to appear in France, my publisher (whom I had yet to meet) spoke warmly about the book on the telephone, then alarmed me by predicting that all the French Flaubertistes would attack it, but that she would get me on French TV where they would find my accent ‘amusing’. However, the reception couldn’t have been kinder – and I remembered Anita Brookner once saying of French (as opposed to British) critics, ‘They are interested.’ I duly went on French TV and Bernard Pivot told his téléspectateurs that I ought to get the Légion d’Honneur. And a year or two later, there I was, number 6382 in Livre de Poche.
All this was of course very flattering. But more than that, there was a wider consequence. My Parrot had taken wing, and over the following years I learned the word for that bird in many different languages. Almost always, it seemed to begin with papa- (though Spanish was an exception – El Loro de Flaubert was their version). And many times, when I held that first French copy in my hand, I found myself wondering how, or indeed if, it would work the other way round. Imagine a youngish French novelist, with a couple of books to his or her name, but quite unknown in Britain, turning in a strange, hybrid, upside-down kind of novel about, say, Dickens. Would English publishers and readers have xvi
given it the time of day? I think not. Nowadays, it’s true, we do translate much more, but still less than other European countries.
So this was one lesson I learned. I had written Flaubert’s Parrot because I had to, because I deeply wanted to (it interrupted a different novel, which I set aside), not in any way expecting it to be more successful than my previous two books, well though they had been received. Flaubert once said, ‘You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang.’ It was advice I might already have come across in his letters, but would not have been confident enough to accept at that point in my career. In a way, these things work back to front. You write as and how you can, and only later do you receive confirmation from the great dead who have come to similar conclusions themselves. And this contributes to the strange sense of community which most writers and artists feel: a community and a constant interaction with those who are long dead and yet, while we commune with them, completely alive.
Another lesson I learned around this time is that there is no point guessing who and what your readership might be. You are and must be aware when writing of ‘the reader’, but when asked to specify the nature of that person, the answer can only be circular. Your ‘reader’ is someone who likes reading your books, who attends very carefully, laughs at your jokes, is temporarily puzzled when you want him or her to be, is moved when you want them to be, and so on. But who specifically this person is, and where they might live, and what their life’s experience might be, is not something you can or should compute. And just as a reader needs to have confidence in the writer, so a writer needs to have confidence in the reader. With Flaubert’s Parrot, part of me suspected that the book might only appeal to Flaubert nerds, professors of French and the occasional oddball who wasn’t put off by the notion of hybridity, of a fictional substructure supporting a factual superstructure, like one of those ships piled with containers rising higher above the deck than the distance from deck to water. In truth, I thought my book would sell less well than my first two novels. So I was astonished when I got my first fan letter. It was from a schoolgirl who lived in Surrey and whose father ran a bookshop. She had seen my novel, was intrigued by the title, and though she had never heard of Flaubert, let alone read any of his books, plunged straight in xvii
and read it with continuing interest. This left me intrigued, relieved and pleased in equal parts. And on reflection I realised that this was my experience as well. Though there are some readers who want to know in advance what to expect, which category the book falls into, what range of attentiveness and involvement will be required of them, there are many who enjoy plunging ignorantly into a novel or work of nonfiction as into a lake, not knowing in advance the depth or temperature of the water (but also aware that it’s quite all right to hurry back out and reach for your towel). For instance, I have a very, very limited interest in fishing – apart, of course, from eating the fish – let alone of standing in a fast-flowing river in a pair of waders, casting about here and there and hoping for a tug on the line. Yet, for some reason I picked up Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It and found myself immediately, well, hooked. A book which is both passionately subjective yet also lucid and objective in exposition will enthral any properly curious reader. And so, I think, it was with Flaubert’s Parrot.
As for the title, I wish I’d been able to copyright its format: the name of a famous person coupled with an intriguingly unobvious item. If I had 50p, or even a little bit more, for every book in the last forty years with titles like Proust’s Overcoat or Pushkin’s Button (also Napoleon’s Buttons) or Beethoven’s Hair or Virginia Woolf’s Nose or Vermeer’s Hat (and so on, and so on), I’d be, well, not that much richer, but a bit more smug about having started a very minor title genre. More broadly, had I known when I handed in my typescript to Liz Calder at Jonathan Cape that Flaubert’s Parrot would still be in print forty years later, I would have been astounded. Also, incredibly grateful. But to what or to whom? You can’t be grateful to yourself. So I suppose I am somehow grateful to the book itself, which now seems rather separate from me, sturdily independent, off with a life of its own. Which is just as well, because I shall at some point die, whereupon my book, I hope, will carry on regardless.
Julian Barnes, 2025