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Something to Declare: Essays on France
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Julian Barnes's long and passionate relationship with la belle
France began more than forty years ago, and in these essays
on the country and the culture he combines a keen
appreciation, a seemingly infinite sphere of reference, and
prose as stylish as classic haute couture.Barnes's vision of
France-quotThe Land Without Brussels Sproutsquot-embraces
its vanishing peasantry its vanished hyper-literate pop singers,
Georges Brassens, Boris Vian, and Jacques Brel (quot[he]
sang at the world as if it30 could be saved from its follies and
brutalities by his vocal embracequot) and the gleeful
iconoclasm of its nouvelle vague cinema (quot'The Underpass
in Modern French Film' is a thesis waiting to be writtenquot).
He describes the elegant tour of France that Henry James and
Edith Wharton made in 1907, and the orgy of drugs and
suffering of the Tour de France in our own time. An

unparalleled connoisseur of French writing and writers, Barnes
gives us his thoughts on the prolific and priapic Simenon, on
Sand, Baudelaire, and Mallarm#233 (quotIf literature is a
spectrum, and Hugo hogs the rainbow, then Mallarm#233 is
working in ultra-violetquot). In several dazzling excursions into
the prickly genius of Flaubert, Barnes discusses his letters his
lover Louise Colet and his biographers (Sartre's The Family
Idiot, quotan intense, unfinished, three-volume growl at
Flaubert, is mad, of coursequot). He delves into Flaubert's
friendship with Turgenev looks at the quotfaithful betrayalquot
of Claude Chabrol's film version of Madame Bovary and
reveals the importance of the pharmacist's assistant, the most
major minor character in Flaubert's great novel: quotif Madame
Bovary were a mansion, Justin would be the handle to the
back door but great architects have the design of doorfurniture
in mind even as they lay out the west wing.quotFor
lovers of France and all things French-and of Julian Barnes's
singular wit and intelligence-Something to Declare is an
unadulterated joy to read.