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Posts tagged ‘Julian Barnes’

Mar 22

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Non 1001 Book Review: The Noise of Time Julian Barnes

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The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes is one of the books on our March Book Madness Bracket and was ranked number 1 in the “fiction by non-U.S. born authors. Did you pick it to go all the way? The book doesn’t come out in the U.S. until May but it has been out in the U.K. for a few months. Here’s my review: Read more

Jan 19

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Featured Author: Julian Barnes

It’s been a crazy week for our blog and our reading lives. Our beloved Shelfari is shutting down and we both spent the week scrambling with group administrators to move our 1001 discussion group over to Goodreads and to transfer years of data over to GR and LibraryThing. Add that to the insane amount of traffic our last post generated — a post I wrote largely in the heat of the moment when I was angry — and our regular posting schedule ground to a halt.

So we are happy to get back to normal (albeit a little late) with our Featured Author post.

January’s featured author turns 70 today and will be releasing one of the most anticipated books of 2016.   Read more

Feb 20

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1001 Book Review: Flaubert’s Parrot

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Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
First Published in: 1984
Reviewed by: Book Worm and Jen

Synopsis (from book jacket): Which of two stuffed parrots was the inspiration for one of Flaubert’s greatest stories? Why did the master keep changing the color of Emma Bovary’s eyes? And why should these minutiae matter so much to Geoffrey Braithwaite, the crankily erudite doctor who is the narrator of this tour de force style and imagination?

In Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes, who has been compared with writers such as Joyce and Calvino, spins out a mystery, an exuberant metafictional inquiry into the ways in which art mirrors life and then turns around to shape it; a look at the perverse autopsies that readers perform on books an lovers perform on their beloved; and a piercing glimpse at the nature of obsession and betrayal both scholarly and romantic.

A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert’s Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour de force of seductive originality

Bookworm’s Review
Rating: ★★★

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.
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