Arthur and George By Julian Barnes

Arthur and George (2006, 400 pages)

Arthur and George is the third book by Julian Barnes I have read.   My first one was The Sense of an Ending and my second was Flaubert's Parrot.   I cannot say which of these novels I like best but I will say Arthur and George was the most fun to read and the most exciting.  The novel is for more than the first half a tale of two men, one the creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories and one a solicitor of Indian descent.

The way Barnes structures this novel is just brilliant.   The characters of the solicitor and of Holmes are just perfect as are the minor players.   Barnes brings the era totally to life for us.   I felt so bad for what happened for the solicitor and you will also.   Doyle gets into spiritualism and I do not fault him for this.   I think once many of the important people in your life have passed the attraction can be understood.  I got chills in the final scenes it was just so brilliant.  How the two lives come together is marvelous and is based on real events.  

  I think the best thing I can do to give potential readers a feel for this novel is to quote the description from the web page of the author.

		Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late 19th century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Catholic Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, George a Birmingham solicitor, is happy in hardworking obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events that made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages. With a mixture of intense research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings into sharp focus not just this long-forgotten case but the inner workings of the two men and the wider psychology of the age. Arthur & George is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes. It is a novel about low crime and high spirituality; guilt and innocence; identity, nationality and race; and thwarted passion. Arthur & George explores what we think, what we believe, and what we know. I really liked this book a lot and I will eagerly read more of Barnes. Please share your experience with Barnes with us.

Maupassant meets Swinburne -A short story and an Essay by Julian Barnes

"An Unlikely Lunch:   Maupassant met Swinburne" by Julian Barnes (2012, 5 pages-essay)

"The Englishman of Etretat" by Guy de Maupassant (1873, translated 2012 by Elliot Lewis)

Agitated Sea at Etretat, by Claude Monet from 1883, depicting the famous rocky archway through which Swinburne was swept out to sea in 1868.

Anytime you can read an essay by Julian Barnes for free, especially one on French literature, you should take the time time.   My main purpose in this post is to make sure my readers know about a new to me resource that looks like it has wonderful potential.   The Public Domain Review carefully selects and introduces texts, videos, music, and art work that is in the public domain.   They are very eclectic in their choices including everything from early 20th century Japanese art prints from little known magazines, to rare videos to records of really old singers I never dreamed I could hear online and best of all for me, lots of things I never heard of before.

Guy de Maupassant (there is some background information on him in my prior posts) is pretty much the consensus second best short story writer of all time.   Maupassant wrote a lot of short stories (pushing 400), my guess (backed up by Frank O'Connor) is that about ten of them are totally great world heritage stories, most of the rest are good stories however a lot of them were written fast by formula and some say they are sentimental to the point of mawkish.

"The Englishman of Etretat" can perhaps best be classified as a non-fiction story or a memoir.  Told in the first person in the voice of the author, it is about the time he met the famous English poet Algernon Swinburne who had come to France to meet Victor Hugo.   Here is a sample of this intriquing work

I believe it was in 1867, perhaps 1868; a young Englishman of unknown origin had bought a little thatched cottage under the trees in Étretat. There he cultivated an uncommon, even unusual existence, largely alone amidst a local population both sly and small-minded that granted him little beyond a customary distrust. We’re led to believe that this eccentric Englishman dieted exclusively upon monkey (whether, sautéed, roasted, boiled or preserved; no matter) and that he would talk aloud for hours, though quite alone. In fact there abounded a hundred such stories serving only to confirm in the minds of the neighbourhood gossips that this fellow was far from ordinary. Perhaps most remarked upon was his living on terms of intimacy with a large monkey: had it been a dog or a cat, surely nothing would have been said, but a pet ape? How awful! What savagery! 

The very real fun in this work, maybe not accurate to call it a short story even though it reads just like one, is in Maupassant's reaction to the very strange Swinburne.  Maupassant knew that he he met someone very special and quite out of the ordinary.  He said of him.

possessed of an uncommon intellect, illuminated undoubtedly by the kinds of nocturnal reveries that inspired Edgar Poe. He had translated a volume of extraordinary Icelandic Legends of which I would most urgently welcome a French translation. Predisposed to the most intricate of spiritual distortions, he inclined instinctively towards the supernatural, the macabre, the profane, but nevertheless and with typically English phlegm, spoke utterly naturally of such unsettling subjects, his calm and quiet voice conferring thereupon a hallucinatory degree of normality. 

I urge anyone interested in either Swinburne or Guy de Maupassant to take the time to read this work.

Julian Barnes fascinating essay is in part about the encounter of Swinburne and de Maupassant but a lot of it is devoted to explaining English tourism on the coast of France and the pilgrimages of literary English to Normandy.   (I have posted on two of Barnes's novels and their is some background information on him in them.)   British artists also began to come to Normandy shortly after the Napoleonic wars ended.  Oscar Wilde came there as soon as he got out of jail.   Swinburne nearly drowned there and on the day that happened de Maupassant was in close vicinity, maybe in  a nearby fishing boat and he was invited to have lunch with Swinburne.   The lunch was a truly bizarre event, in the eyes of de Maupassant it seems an English lunatic with a poetic genius has landed on Normandy and who may have served him monkey meat for lunch.   The belief among the locals in Normandy was  that Swinburne ate only monkey, he did have several monkeys in his house.   Barnes does just a wonderful job describing the luncheon and there is a lot of fascinating quite new to me literary history in the essay.   I cannot imagine anyone with an interest in either writer or English or French literary history not being delighted by the essay of Barnes.

This post is also part of my participation in Paris in July 2012 hosted by Book Bath and Thyme for Tea.

Mel u

Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes

Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes (1984, 190 pages)

Not to long ago I read and really liked  A Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (1946,UK) for which he won the 2011 Man Booker Prize.  I think A Sense of an Ending is the kind of book almost everyone will like and I think Flaubert's Parrot is a work people will either love or get bored with quickly.  I loved it.

I could not help but think of Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov as I read this book.  If you are not interested in the work and the life of Gustav Flaubert I do not think you will enjoy this book.   It is about a fictional doctor's obsessive interest in Gustav Flaubert, especially in a stuffed parrot he once owned.    We go along as the retired doctor, a widower, visits France and goes to a number of places associated with  Flaubert.  The fun of the book is in the reflections of the doctor about Flaubert and his associates.  The book just jumps right in and assumes you know who a lot of people in Flaubert's life are.    There is a lot of preoccupation with the sex life of Flaubert in the book, including his life long fondness for brothels and prostitutes of both sexes.  The doctor tells us several times of the Egyptian catamites Flaubert encountered , as if he wants to see if he can shock or offend us.

This novel is in part literary biography, even if a bit of an offbeat one, in part a reflection on France, modernism, and the role of writer in society.   Most of what I know of the life of Gustav Flaubert comes from Flaubert:  A Biography by Frederick Brown, a superb book.  Nothing in Flaubert's Parrot jumped out at me as wrong.

During Irish Short Story Week Two, March 11 to July 1, I am still reading longer works of fiction, though less than normal and I will post on them as I finish and when I can I will try to relate the works to Irish Short Stories.

The relationship of Flaubert to the Irish Short Story is very clear and strong.  Flaubert was the role model for countless writers and his influence is beyond  measure.

I found Flaubert's Parrot fascinating.  You can download a sample of the book from Amazon and I really suggest you do this before buying it, even if you like his other works.    I have three other of the novels of Barnes and will probably next read England, England. 

"One of a Kind" by Julian Barnes A Short Story by the 2011 Booker Prize Winner

"One of a Kind" by Julian Barnes (1982, 15 pages)

Julian Barnes (1946, UK) won the 2011 Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending.   Three others of  his novels have been short listed for the award.   I have seen a number of very favorable posts on his work from book bloggers whose judgement I have learned to trust so I was very happy to see one of his short stories, "One of a Kind", was included in a collection of short stories I recently acquired, The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories.    (A sample of The Sense of an Ending can be downloaded from Amazon but I not like ready selections of novels.)   One use of short stories is to sample an author, especially for people who see themselves as pretty much exclusively readers of longer fiction.    Based on reading "One of a Kind" I would for sure be interested in reading one of his longer works.

"One of a Kind" sounds like it might be based on the experiences of Barnes at a literary conference in Bucharest.   The story, told in the first person by an author, begins with the narrator offering a grand theory about Romania.   His theory is that Romanian only has the cultural energy to produce one great philosopher, one novelist, one one poet, etc.   He offers this theory to a Romanian writer and intellectual living in exile because of his political views who of course takes exception to this notion.   There are a number of  interesting conversations in the story.    It was fun to see the narrator and an Italian writer visit the book stores of Bucharest.   There is a lot to enjoy in "One of a Kind". It is straightforward story telling written in a pleasant fashion and the character insights displayed are very good.

There are no great events or revelations in this story.   It is an interesting slice of life at a writer's conference.,

Please share your experience with Barnes with us.


Mel u