![]() ![]() And he sets an example, if not of humility, then of the humble pose becoming to biographers, by giving to his own enamored, select, contentious reflections on the Master the form of footnotes or appendixes to a true life that can’t be written.īraithwaite also makes a wishful demand for a twenty-year injunction against novels set in Oxford or Cambridge and a ten-year ban on other university fiction-a demand that may have been aimed in part at Byatt. “Words came easily to Flaubert but he also saw the underlying inadequacy of the Word,” Braithwaite tells us. ![]() He “hates” Flaubert’s professional critics, because they give themselves such airs of omniscience yet get things so wrong, and he compares biography to a trawling net that lets slip all but a fragment of what it might have captured. ![]() An excellent recent novel describing that romance was Julian Barnes’s “Flaubert’s Parrot.” It was as precious an artifact for the bookish reader as the stuffed bird of its title was for Barnes’s narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite. Byatt calls “the delectable drug of understanding” they graduate to a consuming romance with language, in comparison with which other forms of pleasure will seem mundane. People who devote their lives to literature often have their first love affairs with the great dead writers, and through a subsequent addiction to what A. S. Photograph by Jane Bown / Camera Press / Redux ![]()
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