Julian Barnes
First published 1984
Picador
A great, naturally smooth, economy in driving to sidetracks, e.g. to Stanley's throwing away Salammbó when in distress in Africa. Delightful.
Medicine then must have been such an exciting, desperate, violent business; nowadays it is all pills and bureaucracy.
p. 11
Words came easily to Flaubert, but he also saw the underlying inadequacy of the Word. Remember his sad definition from Madame Bovary: 'Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity'.
[Dr Starkie's atrocious French accent] didn't affect her competence to teach at the University of Oxford, because until quite recently the place preferred to treat modern languages as if they were dead: this made them more respectable.
So this painstaking genious couldn't even keep the eyes of his most famous character a consistent colour?
You'll see what local painters liked to paint, over and over again: the view north. A strip of beach, the see, and the eventful sky. English painters never did the same, clustering at Hastings, or Margate, or Eastbourne, to gaze out at a grumpy, monotonous Channel.
I go for those things you forget about until you see them again.
pp. 93-94
The age he lived in was stupid; the new age, brought by the Franco-Prussian war, would be even stupider. Of course some things would change: the spirit of Homais was winning.
p. 95
Flaubert disapproved: 'The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed'.
p. 98
Contemporary critics who pompously reclassify all novels and plays and poems as text — the author to the guillotine! — shouldn't lightly skip on Flaubert. A century before them he was preparing texts and denying the significance of his own personality.
[Louise Collet] lived in Paris, he at Croisset; he wouldn't come to the capital, she wasn't allowed to visit him in the country. So they would meet approximately half-way, at Mantes, where the Hôtel du Grand Cerf would allow them a night or two of lurid rapture and false promises.
The work of art is a pyramid which stands in the desert, uselessly: jackals piss at the basis of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it.
They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish some women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them.
Perhaps it was one of them.