Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes
Published 1984 · 227 pages · 65,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Flaubert's Parrot to read?
Flaubert's Parrot scores 62 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Barnes writes with erudite precision, deploying vocabulary appropriate to literary criticism, biography, and French culture. The language rewards educated readers without being exclusionary.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Sentences range from aphoristic compression to essayistic elaboration. Barnes's style is witty and varied, demanding attention but delivering pleasure.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- The novel moves freely between biography, criticism, and narrative, mixing abstract reflection on art and life with concrete scenes. The shifts in mode require flexibility.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Dense with references to Flaubert's life, work, and era. Some familiarity with 19th-century French literature enriches the experience, though Barnes provides enough context.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- The narrator's own story emerges obliquely through his obsession with Flaubert. What he's actually working through becomes clear only gradually.
- Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
- The stuffed parrot that may or may not have belonged to Flaubert becomes an emblem for the impossibility of recovering the past. Barnes builds his metaphors with scholarly playfulness.
- Ironic distance: 65 out of 100
- Pervasive irony marks Barnes's approach to scholarship, biography, and love. The narrator's self-awareness doesn't protect him from pain, which is precisely the point.
- Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
- The narrator's personal revelation arrives late and quietly, while the Flaubert questions remain deliberately unresolved. Barnes refuses the consolations of closure.
- Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
- The novel is formally experimental, mixing chapters of biography, a bestiary, an exam paper, and more. Readers must embrace the structure's playful fragmentation.
How Flaubert's Parrot is regarded
Flaubert's Parrot holds a literary regard score of 69 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.