"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'.

Comments

Post a Comment

POPULAR POSTS

Kafka and Rilke

Kafka remarking (in a letter) on Rilke's words re Kafka's work: Incidentally, back in Prague I remembered Rilke's words. After some extremely kind remarks about "The Stoker," he went on to say that neither Metamorphosis nor "In the Penal Colony" had achieved the same effect. This observation may not be easy to understand, but it is discerning. The footnote on this passage reads (in part): Rilke and Kafka probably never met personally. Kafka may have heard of Rilke's opinion about his works through Eugen Mondt. Since "In the Penal Colony" was not printed at the time, Rilke, who then lived in Munich, must have seen the manuscript which had arrived in Munich on September 30 and discussed it with Eugen Mondt....   Rilke followed Kafka's work with great interest; in a letter to Kurt Wolff of February 17, 1922, he says, "Please put me down especially for anything that appears by Franz Kafka. I am, I might assure you, not his ...
Read more

TÜBINGEN, JANUARY by Paul Celan

T Ü BINGEN, JANUARY Eyes talked in- to blindness. Their  -- "a riddle, what is pure- ly arisen" --, their memory of floating H ö lderlintowers, gull- enswirled. Visits of drowned joiners to these plunging words: Came, if there came a man, came a man to the world, today, with the patriarchs' light-beard: he could, if he spoke of this time, he could only babble and babble, ever- ever- moremore. ("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")* * Pallaksch A word that H ö lderlin, spending his last years in the home of a T ü bingen carpenter, was given to uttering in his dementia; it could signify Yes or No. [Poem Translated by John Felstiner; the explanation of Pallaksch is also from his "Notes" in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan ]  
Read more

Edinburgh: St. Cuthbert's: Thomas De Quincey's Grave

Image
We were in the Ibis just off the Royal Mile. I had walked halfway around the castle on the first night and I knew basically where St. Cuthbert's was. I woke early, checked the "big board" (a magical electronic map in the hotel) in terms of details, and was off. Of course, once there, it took me a little while to find De Quincey (I even Googled to get a look at his stone and adjacent stones -- this helped immensely). Luckily it was a pretty small graveyard. Pics: "on the way to" and "within" the churchyard/graveyard of St. Cuthbert's, Edinburgh. *                                    
Read more

The Parlograph

Image
Felice worked for the Carl Lindstrom Company. From Kafka's Letters to Felice : Here, by the way, is a rather nice idea: a Parlograph goes to the telephone in Berlin, while a gramophone does likewise in Prague, and these two carry on a little conversation with each other. *** Carl Lindström A.G. was a global record company founded in 1893 and based in Berlin , Germany . Founded by Carl Lindström (1869–1932), a Swedish inventor living in Berlin , it originally produced phonographs or gramophones with the brand names "Parlograph" and "Parlophon" and eventually began producing records as well. It became the holding company for Odeon Records , Parlophone Records (originally "Parlophon"), Beka Records and Okeh Records . Lindström sold the company to Max Straus (Odeon co-founder), but Lindström remained with the company as an engineer and inventor. World War I caused the company to cut back its holdings closing the United Kingdom branch of O...
Read more