Something to Declare
by Julian Barnes
Picador
"Loving a writer often results in a ferocity of defence not evidenced in 'more serious' areas of life, like politics or marriage," Julian Barnes writes of Mario Vargas Llosa in "Flaubert's Death-Masks," one of the many essays on Gustave Flaubert that make up most of "Something to Declare." He could just as well have been justifying his own work.
Like Vargas Llosa, Barnes has had a long and public love affair with the creator of Madame Bovary, proving himself an ardent and prolific suitor with a book, "Flaubert's Parrot," and several critical essays on the great French novelist to his name. "I wish he'd shut up about Flaubert," Barnes quotes Kingsley Amis as saying of him in the preface.
Readers sympathetic to Amis' exasperation aren't likely to pick up "Something to Declare," which is too bad. The book is not just another homage to Flaubert, but a lively collection of writing about Barnes' lifelong, and at times passionately complex, relationship to France. French food, music and film are all discussed by Barnes in his usual urbane style, as are Edith Wharton's "motoring flights" through the pre-World War I French countryside and the history of drug taking among the cyclists competing in the Tour de France.
But Flaubert is the star of the essays collected here; his presence is impossible to avoid. Barnes seems to have an inexhaustible interest in the man, his work and the society that surrounded him. Almost every aspect of Flaubert's life is touched on in these essays — Barnes scrutinizes his correspondences, his love affair with Louise Colet and his working habits. Surprisingly, the very qualities that make the non-Flaubert essays presented here so readable are enough to draw a reader — even a non-Flaubert loving reader — into Barnes's dissection of the French writer.
Perhaps it is more than Barnes' writing style that makes his analysis of Flaubert compelling. The same nimble, insightful thinking that connects a eulogy for the grand dame of British food writing, Elizabeth David, to the history of nouvelle cuisine to the panic of novice cooks confronting artfully simple recipes is on display in the Flaubert essays. What initially appears to be a narrow topic is often an engaging exploration of a wider subject. In one such piece, Barnes presents Flaubert's correspondence with George Sand as a "whole argument":
The argument every writer and reader has with him- and herself, the argument art never ceases to have with itself: Beauty v. Utility, Truthfulness v. Moral Uplift, Happy Few v. Mass Audience, Contemporary Relevance v. Future Durability ...
Two 19th century literary giants might be at the center of this essay, but Barnes' interest is not limited to what Flaubert and Sand had to say about these questions in their letters to each other. He's intrigued by the questions themselves, as are, it might be surmised, his readers. Despite appearances, this book isn't just about Flaubert, or even only about France. Barnes has produced a collection of essays with a far more universal appeal.
— Jessica Chapel (jnc at flakmag dot com)
