A Confession of sorts: I am a binge-reader.
Okay, that’s not much of a confession; most readers will admit to the same addiction. We find a writer we like and then gobble up everything we can find that he/she has written. I, for one, am still annoyed with Jane Austen because of her pitiful production—why couldn’t she have been more like Isaac Azimov or P.G. Wodehouse, who cranked out about a hundred books apiece?
About three decades ago, my writer of choice was Julian Barnes. I read everything I could get my hands on, but the Barnes book that really got to me was Flaubert's Parrot. It, in turn, led to reading a lot of Flaubert. I’d never read his work, but soon worked my way through Madame Bovary, Salammbo, Bouvard and Pecuchet, The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, The Collected Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857, The Collected Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1857-1880, Sentimental Education—and even Sartre’s study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot, and Louise Colet’s Lui: A View of Him. What can I say? I’m an addict. The thing that drove me was what I could not find in any of those books.
A parrot.
Last week I met a young man who told me he had studied nineteenth-century French literature. When Flaubert came up in our discussion, I learned about an excellent translation, by Charlotte Mandell, of A Simple Heart.
I ordered it immediately.
It’s a novella (a form I frequently use in my own writing) about a simple peasant woman, Félicité, who suffers repeated unrequited longings, only to lose their objects to death. Eventually, she finds solace in the company of—you guessed it—a parrot. The parrot Loulou also dies, but Félicité sends it to a taxidermist to have it stuffed. She talks to the ex-parrot, prays to it, and begins to believe that the holy ghost is not a dove, but a parrot.
You might expect that the author of The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas would have mocked the simple servant, Félicité, but he does not. Instead, he wrote a touching portrait of a life of sadness, and faith, and an unshakable belief in the goodness of others—a belief that required no evidence of that goodness.
Like Félicité, I am at the age when I lose the people who made me who I am. My Grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, my only sibling, and most of my cousins—gone. So many of my friends, and former lovers—gone. It’s a natural fact of aging.
In 1876, Flaubert lost the two loves of his life—Louise Colet and George Sand. Colet had been the model for Emma Bovary, and he wrote A Simple Heart for George Sand—but she didn’t live to see it finished. He wrote, at the time, “My heart is becoming a necropolis.”
Some of us are lucky—or unlucky—enough to outlive our influencers. But, just like all those books we binge-read, they made us who we are. So, in a sense, as long as we exist, they are not completely gone.
We are them.
But something new has happened in recent years, something Flaubert could never have imagined: the internet and social media. It has led to the formation of new communities of like-minded individuals, people we would have—if we had ever met—naturally become friends and/or lovers. Or, “influencers,” if you prefer. While I miss all those who are no longer with me, social media (Facebook, Linked In, and yes, Substack) have made it possible to stay in touch with the sort of people who should have been there all along. I commune with them just as Félicité communed with her stuffed bird.
Social media are my stuffed parrot.
Paid subscribers to these substack pages get access to a complete edition of my novella: Noirvella is a modern story of revenge, told in the style of film noir. They can also read the first part of Unbelievable, a kind of rom-com that forms around a pompous guy who is conceited, misinformed, and undeservedly successful. Both books are sold by Amazon, but paid subscribers get them for free!
Also, substack pages (older than eight months) automatically slip behind a paywall—so only paid subscribers can read them. If you’re interested in reading any of them, you can subscribe, or wait until they are re-released in book form (something I’m in the process of considering).
Meanwhile, it is easy to become a paying subscriber (just like supporting your favorite NPR station). It’s entirely optional, and—even if you choose not to do so—you’ll continue to get my regular substack posts—and I’ll still be happy to have you as a reader.
And now you're leading me to Julian Barnes and the parrot. Thank you!
Absolutely right, Gary, absolutely.