Flaubert’s Parrot was published by Jonathan Cape in 1984, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and established Barnes as one of the most formally inventive English novelists of his generation. The novel follows Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired doctor and amateur Flaubert scholar, as he attempts to determine which of two stuffed parrots (one in Rouen, one in Croisset) is the parrot that sat on Flaubert’s desk while he wrote “Un Coeur Simple.”
This apparently trivial question opens into something vast: an investigation of biography, knowledge, grief, and the impossibility of possessing another person’s truth. Braithwaite’s Flaubert obsession is a displacement of personal grief (his wife has died, and the circumstances of her death are gradually revealed) and a meditation on what we can know about anyone — living or dead, loved or studied.
The novel’s form is deliberately digressive: chapters take the shape of a chronology (three different chronologies of Flaubert’s life, each selecting different facts to create a different man), an examination paper, a bestiary, a dictionary, a train journey. Each form reveals something about the subject while simultaneously demonstrating the inadequacy of any single approach. You cannot capture a life in one form; you cannot know another consciousness fully; and the project of biography — like the project of love — is always incomplete.
Barnes’s prose is precise, witty, and emotionally devastating without ever becoming sentimental. The ending — the revelation about Braithwaite’s wife and his inability to understand her — reframes the entire novel as a meditation on the limits of knowledge and love.
Collecting Flaubert’s Parrot
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1984): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $80–$250
- Signed first edition: $200–$500
- US first (Knopf, 1985): $30–$80
- Without jacket: $15–$30