Something to Declare

Anyone who loves France (or just feels strongly about it), or has succumbed to the spell of Julian Barnes’ previous books, will be enraptured by this collection of essays on the country and its culture.

Barnes’ appreciation extends from France’s vanishing peasantry to its hyperliterate pop singers, from the gleeful iconoclasm of nouvelle vague cinema to the orgy of drugs and suffering that is the Tour de France. Above all, Barnes is an unparalleled connoisseur of French writing and writers. Here are the prolific and priapic Simenon, Baudelaire, Sand, and Sartre, and several dazzling excursions on the prickly genius of Flaubert. Lively yet discriminating in its enthusiasm, seemingly infinite in its range of reference, and written in prose as stylish as haute couture, Something to Declare is an unadulterated joy.

©2009 Julian Barnes (P)2021 Recorded Books Inc.

Barnes analyses French culture from Flaubert to Lance Armstrong.

This fabulous treasure provides detailed analyses of selected topics of 250 years of French culture. Especially notable are details of Gustave Flaubert’s life and most significant work, Madame Bovary, including narrative, author’s bio, and critical observations of contemporary films made of a novel which ironically the author refused to allow to be illustrated! Barnes creates an arc between text, media, and contemporary presence of material manifestations of Flaubert’s fiction.