Fleetwood Mac – "Oh Well (Part 1)" (1969)

Don't ask me what I think of you

I might not give the answer

That you want me to

Julian Barnes is one of the most highly regarded British novelists alive today.  He’s taken home more literary prizes than you can shake a stick at – including the uberprestigious Man Booker Prize (now simply called the Booker Prize), which he won in 2011 for The Sense of the Ending. 

Julian Barnes

I first became acquainted with Barnes about 20 years ago, when I was in the midst of a Madame Bovary obsession – Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece, which is arguably the greatest of all 19th-century novels.  (That’s saying something given all the great novelists who were writing in that century – including Dickens, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Henry James, Melville, Trollope, Tolstoy, Twain, and Zola, just to name a few.)

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I first read Madame Bovary in print, then listened to the book on CDs, then watched the 1991 Claude Chabrol movie adaptation (which starred Isabelle Huppert).  

I then moved on to Flaubert’s other works – including the novel Sentimental Education and Three Tales, which included a story titled “A Simple Heart.”

The main character in “A Simple Heart” was an unmarried, childless female servant who has a pet parrot.  Flaubert apparently had a stuffed parrot sitting on his desk when he was writing “A Simple Heart” – at least that’s what Julian Barnes says in his 1984 book, Flaubert’s Parrot, which is a novel about a retired English widower who becomes obsessed with Flaubert.  

Once I discovered Flaubert’s Parrot, of course I had to read it. 

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Flaubert’s Parrot is a very odd duck.  It’s mostly fiction, but also includes quite a bit of biographical information about Flaubert and a fair amount of literary criticism to boot.  (The penultimate chapter takes the form of a faux college essay exam on the material presented in the previous chapters of the book.)

Whether the stuffed parrot really existed or is a fragment of Barnes’s imagination is something I’m not sure about.

Barnes’s most recent novel, Elizabeth Finch, is just as odd as Flaubert’s Parrot. 

Its first third of the book is about the narrator’s obsession with the titular character, a spinster English professor who was a great influence on him.  The next part is a biographical essay about Julian the Apostate, the last non-Christian Roman emperor, who ruled for less than two years before dying in the Battle of Samarra in 363.

I haven’t read the final third of the book yet, but I hope Barnes explains what the hell all the Julian the Apostate stuff is about.

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Early in the book, a fellow student of the narrator’s named Linda asks him for advice.  Specifically, Linda asks him if she should ask the professor for advice concerning her love life.  The narrator finds Linda’s idea somewhat bizarre – Elizabeth Finch is a somewhat forbidding presence, and has never uttered a word about her own relationships or said anything else that would make a reasonable person conclude she would be open to dispensing advice about relationships to one of her students – but he doesn’t tell her so:

Linda came to seek my advice. . . . But I soon realized that Linda didn’t really want my input; or rather, she wanted my input as long as it coincided with what she’d already decided to do.  Some people are like that; perhaps most.  So, to make her feel better, I shifted my position and approved her intention.

I think most people are like that.  I’m probably like that – are you like that?

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I first featured “Oh Well (Part 1)” in 2020.  The lines from that song quoted above are the Madame Flaubert of rock lyrics – I can’t think of better ones.

Click here to listen to “Oh Well (Part 1).” 

Click here to buy the song from Amazon.