Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Julian Barnes - Something to Declare: Essays on Fr...
Being a Francophile is necessary but not sufficient to enjoy Julian Barnes's 2002 collection (mostly of book reviews) Something to Declare: Essays on France. There are two chapters on the Tour de France (bicycle race), one on the break between critics-turned-directors Jean-Luc Godard and Françoise Truffaut, very much siding with the latter) and one on Jaques Brel and his generation of troubadours. All the rest of the book is about writers. Three chapters are about Anglophone Francophiles (Edith Wharton motoring with Henry James, culinary writer Elizabeth David, and historian Richard Cobb). More than half the book is about Gustave Flaubert — no surprise to me since the only Barnes novel I've read is the delightful Flaubert's Parrot. Most of the Flaubert-related chapters are reviews of collections of Flaubert letters, including correspondence with fellow novelists Ivan Turgenev and George Sand. (Though I am more interested in Turgenev than in Sand, the chapter on the Flaubert-Sand correspondence is livelier and more informative than the one on Flaubert-Turgenev letters.)
There is also a lively review of Belgian-born Georges Simenon (creator of Chief Inspector Maigret and author of more than 400 novels before retiring to churn out volume after volume of unreliable memoirs). Barnes's appreciation of Mario Vargas Llosa's book about Flaubert's fiction (The Perpetual Orgy) is set between very funny (in a very British way) critiques of biographies of Flaubert by Jean-Paul Sartre (The Family Idiot) and Herbert Lottman (who had written a biography of Albert Camus). The three reviews are strung together into a chapter titled "Flaubert's Death Mask."
It is preceded by a similar stringing together of three pieces from the New York Review of Books about poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, and egomaniacal painter Gustave Courbet (all contemporaries of Flaubert), each of which strikes me as quite insightful. I was also interested in a piece about visiting New Wave director Claude Chabrol in his country house to talk about Chabrol's adaptation (starring Isabelle Huppert in the title role) of Madame Bovary. Barnes has interesting things to say about adapting novels to stage and screen and records. Chabrol's judgment that the worst movie ever was the Joshua Logan Hollywood (non-musical) version of the Broadway musical version of "Fanny" (with Leslie Caron in the title role).
The reprinted Barnes introduction to Richard Cobb's Paris and Elsewhere (along with it being recommended to me by Amazon...) persuaded me to order the book. (Stay tuned to find out whether I turn out to be grateful for this nudge...)
I think that enjoying most of the book requires more than a passing knowledge of Flaubert's life and writings, especially of Madame Bovary. The reviews were not written just for Flaubert specialists (in the TLS, London Review of Books, New Yorker, and New York Review of Books -- all generalist publications) and are accessibly written and often witty, but someone interested in France rather than in Flaubert is unlikely to enjoy the series of takes on different sets of Flaubert letters (and notebooks). Barnes himself writes that ''knowing a second country means choosing what you want from it," but the choice of interests strikes me as very narrow. However, in that I am far more interested in Flaubert than in Jacques Brel or even the doping-scandal-plagues 2008 Tour de France, perhaps I don't really want a greater breadth of French phenomena for Barnes to make declarations about?
I'd say that this is a meta-French find as well as "endearingl English" plus a meta-resurrecting oldies book. I'd add that I love the hardcover edition's photo -- of cars parked beneath Mont Saint-Michel. Alas it is the paperback cover that is shown here -- with Sartre looming larger than Flaubert.
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