Word: reader
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...Joyce, in other words Flaubert's Parrot is formally challenging and richly allusive--French literary history is constantly invoked, even on the level of sentences like "Ed had pondered the menu as if he were Verlaine being brought his first square meal in months" --but it always includes the reader, even the one who may never have given Madame Bovary more than a quick once-over in high school...
GEOFFREY BRAITHWAITE, the narrator, a sixtyish widowed doctor and impassioned amateur Flaubert scholar, buttonholes us with a barrage of offbeat facts, quotation from Flaubert's letters, meditations on his art, and opinions on literature in general. He's obsessed with his subject, and gently craws the reader into his obsession...
...French side: clearer, yet more volatile. The sky is a theatre of possibilities. I'm not romanticising." The central chapter of the book, in which all the themes come together, is even symbolically cast in the form of a conversation during a Channel crossing between Braithwaite and the reader, his fellow traveler...
...serious side of De Vries has been subject to considerable analysis, most of it attempts to align the author's dour Dutch Calvinist upbringing with his development as a comic writer. To borrow a De Vriesian analogy, such treatment is like putting the reader into a diving bell and taking him down 3 ft. His latest novel counters that effect by granting his fans a chance to wet their feet once again in the forbidding shallows of sex, money and social class...
This failure to provide genuine inactive news leaves the reader feeling betrayed, Barry, who tries his readers by writing in sentence fragments, simply refuses to part with scandalous or embarrasing anecdotes, though he reminds us that he knows many. The closest we come is a scene of the Queen spreading newspaper over the carpeting of the Royal Train. It was for her prized corgis to use, in lieu of "walkies...