from NYT Book Review
"Flaubert - the hermit of Croisset who sacrificed living to his unending quest for style, the father of modernism who wished most of all to write ''a book about nothing'' - is so belied by what we know of the man and his rich inner life....
Mr. Barnes... has appropriately given us the story of an obsession with Flaubert. The result is a splendid hybrid of a novel, part biography, part fiction, part literary criticism, the whole carried off with great brio. ''Flaubert's Parrot'' is high literary entertainment.
The obsession belongs to the narrator of the novel, one Geoffrey Braithwaite, a cranky but somewhat endearing English doctor in his 60's who spends his considerable leisure time pursuing trivia concerning his great man. He attempts to ferret out the dimensions of the Rouen cab in which Emma Bovary was seduced, the railway schedules that got Flaubert and his mistress to their trysts at the H^otel du Grand Cerf in Mantes (halfway between Rouen and Paris), and the true identity of that stuffed parrot Flaubert borrowed from the Rouen museum and placed on his desk while he was writing ''A Simple Heart.''
MEETING LOCATION: Will be sent to YES RSVP's the weekend before the gathering using the MeetUp message system.