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advances and retreats before our eyes: in France, in Damascus where he eats dromedary, on trains, at home, in love or not as the case may be, unfaithful, syphilitic, affectionate, writing with a stuffed parrot on his desk.
    Braithwaite’s biographical pursuit of Flaubert alternates between the ponderous, the comic and the revealing – ‘Louise is puzzlingly unable to grasp that Gustave Flaubert can love her without ever wanting to see her’ – presenting us with an intriguing if elusive Flaubert, a man who issues pensées which crack the heart. Behind both Flaubert and Braithwaite lurks Barnes himself, playful and astute, his encyclopedic intelligence always surprising the reader into laughter or astonishment. Flaubert’s Parrot is a novel to be read again and again for its sardonic wit and biographical eccentricities, for the precision of Barnes’s use of language and for its enigmas. It is, as was Flaubert’s parrot, ‘a fluttering, elusive emblem of the writer’s voice’.
    Julian Barnes was born in Leicester and lives in London. A prizewinner in England, France and Germany, among his other acclaimed novels are A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), Talking it Over (1991), England, England (1998) and Arthur and George (2005).
    Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.
     
     

Samuel Beckett 1906–1989
     
1955–1958 The Molloy Trilogy
     
Molloy (1955), Malone Dies (1956), The Unnameable (1958)
     
    Samuel Beckett’s trilogy, published first in French in the early 1950s, and then translated by the author (with Patrick Bowles as a collaborator on Molloy ) and published in English some years later, remains his monumental achievement in prose fiction, although some of his later short prose fiction is magnificent.
    Beckett is concerned in his prose, and in his plays, to deal once and for all with the idea of narrative and character and plot. His characters think and remember, but this does not help them; they are sure that Being is a sour joke inflicted on them. They know they are alive because their bodies tell them so, and they are constantly humiliated by their bodies. The drama is between action and inaction, between the possibility that the next sentence will lead us nowhere, or further back, or forward into a joke, or a snarl, or a nightmare, or a terrible darkness. Some of the writing – the sentence construction, the rhythms, the pacing and timing, the voice – is exquisitely beautiful, not a word out of place, but at the same time every word out of place, every word (and, indeed, action and memory) open to constant interpretation, revaluation, negation. The tone in the last volume becomes more dense and difficult, and at times more simple and stark. ‘This silence they are always talking about, from which supposedly he came, to which he will return when his act is over, he doesn’t know what it is, nor what he is meant to do, in order to deserve it.’
    Samuel Beckett was born in Ireland. He lived most of his life in France. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.
    Age in years these books were published: forty-nine – fifty-two.
     
     

Sybille Bedford 1911–2006
     
1956 A Legacy
     
    ‘I spent the first nine years of my life in Germany, bundled to and fro between two houses.’ This is the voice of seven-year-old Francesca, recounting the story of the life of her father and his two German families before the beginning of the First World War.
    The first are the von Feldens, Bavarian Catholic barons in Baden in southern Germany, culturally more French than German. The story of her uncle, Johannes von Felden, forced into the German army, and of how his fate affects his three brothers, is one which Bedford uses to shocking effect to reveal the chasm between old Bavaria and the brutality of northern militaristic Prussian ways. The other family are the Merzes, Jewish upper bourgeoisie, living in Berlin on money made from banking and trade. The lives and marriages of these two dynasties