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January 01 Flaubert's ParrotQuoting:
Flaubert: Pride is a wild beast which lives in caves and roams the desert; Vanity, on the other hand, is a parrot which hops from branch to branch and chatters away in full view.
The control of tone is vital. Imagine the technical difficulty of writing a story in which a badly-stuffed bird with a ridiculous name ends up standing out for one third of the Trinity, and inwhich the intention is neither satirical, sentimental, nor blasphemous. Imagine further telling such a story from the point of view of an ignorant old woman without making it sound derogatory or coy. But then the aim of Un coeur simple is quite elsewhere: the parrot is a perfect and controlled example of the Flaubertian grotesque. (It cannot help being serious and comic at the same time.)
I don't much care for coincidences. There is something spooky about them: you sense momentarilly what it must be like to live in an ordered, God-run universe, with himself looking over your shoulder and helpfully dropping coarse hints about a cosmic plan...
I don't even care for harmless, comic coincidencs. I once went out to dinner and discoverd that the seven other people present had all just finished reading A Dance to the Music of Time. I didn't relish this: not least because it meant that I didn't break my silence until the cheese course.
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