SOMETHING TO DECLARE

A most un-English embrace of all (well, most) things French by the noted English novelist (Love, Etc., 2001, etc.).

Barnes has a far more intimate knowledge of next-door-neighbor France than most of his famously insular (in more ways than one) compatriots, and for several reasons: “Both my parents taught French; I went to France with them on holiday; I read French at school and university; I taught for a year at a Catholic school in Rennes (where my gastronomic conservatism was unpicked); my favorite writer is Flaubert; many of my intellectual reference points are French; and so on.” These essays are an expression of his many enthusiasms, which are slightly more refined than those of one of his subjects, the historian Richard Cobb, who “preferred les petites gens both in his life and in his writing”; like Cobb, Barnes is at home among florists and bakers, parking attendants and small-town bankers, but his real loci are the likes of Monet and Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard and, yes, Gustave Flaubert, the subject of many of the pieces collected here. (Most were previously published in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.) About Flaubert, that great examiner of the bourgeois mind, Barnes is most illuminating, finding in his writings the qualities of “fluency, profligacy, range, and sexual frankness; to which we should add power, control, wit, emotion, and furious intelligence.” Barnes’s own writings here show many of those qualities, particularly intelligence and range, but those not familiar with allusive (and elusive) style and not already disposed to share his francophilia may find them arid at times, and perhaps even beyond the ken of all but the most sophisticated native.

Still, those planning a trip to the Louvre or a browsing tour through the stacks devoted to la belle France will find Barnes’s essays to be a worthy companion.