Flaubert's Parrot
A retired English doctor with a dead wife he will not discuss goes to Rouen and finds two museums each displaying the stuffed parrot that stood on Flaubert's desk while he wrote A Simple Heart. His attempt to settle which bird is the real one turns into three contradictory chronologies of the novelist's life, a bestiary, an examination paper and a dictionary of received ideas. How much of a writer is recoverable from the objects left behind is the book's actual subject, and its own broken form is the argument.
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- alludes to ↑ Three Tales
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- 49% · 12 shared