"Flaubert's Parrot": Enjoying It, I Think

Ok, I'm enjoying it, for the most part. That said he's not Nabokov; he's not even Coetzee. Hard to put a finger on it--is it that silliness often tries to pass for wit? is it that stylistically Barnes just doesn't rise to their level?--and perhaps I'm rushing to judgment.

Time will tell.

*

Re Nabokov: the narrator, Braithwaite, enjoys alluding to Nabokov. He's already tried to tell us that Nabokov got the phonetics wrong on the name Lolita (of course he's just repeating what he heard at a lecture).

This morning he's anxious to let us know what Nabokov said about Emma Bovary's adultery:

Do you know what Nabokov said about adultery in his lecture on Madame Bovary? He said it was 'a most conventional way to rise above the conventional'.

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