A review by nick_jenkins
Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes

3.0

Clever-clever rather than clever; reminds me of Alain de Botton’s book in Proust. Barnes seems an unlikeable man (if he is going to transgress the death of the author, turnabout’s fair play). I admire the vigor of his prose, but two of the features which lend him that vigor are repetition and italics. Their presence (in this and The Sense of an Ending) feel like authorial condescension to me—a sign that the writer believes that most of his interactions are with intellectual inferiors. He has a traditional English misogynist’s rancor toward “lady critics,” and reveals a nasty undercurrent of homophobia.