David Hockney Jacket Art (2 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Very good. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. Second Printing [stated]. 190 pages. Postcard referencing the book laid in. DJ has some wear and soiling. Minor edge soiling. Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is an English writer. Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for his book The Sense of an Ending (2011), and three of his earlier books had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005). He has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories. Barnes's breakthrough novel Flaubert's Parrot (1984) departed from the traditional linear structure of his previous novels and featured a fragmentary biographical style story of an elderly doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, who focuses obsessively on the life of Gustave Flaubert. In reference to Flaubert, Barnes has said, "he's the writer whose words I most carefully tend to weigh, who I think has spoken the most truth about writing." Flaubert's Parrot was published to great acclaim, especially in France, and it helped established Barnes as one of the pre-eminent writers of his generation. In 2004 he became a Commandeur of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His honours also include the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. This book is a richly inventive, as well as audacious effort to depict, with great exactitude, Flaubert's unsettling condition of genius. The author has introduced into his literary meditation a high element of risk and an enchanting spirit of play to enrich our understanding. This novel is peppered with clues to the truth about its enigmatic narrator: Goeffrey Braithwaite, a retired English physician and obsessive amateur Flaubert scholar, an intensely private man whose own moving story emerges through his highly idiosyncratic ordering and presentation of certain things he knows about Flaubert. A novel whose true (dual) protagonists--invisible but omnipresent--are Life and Art, in constant collision, strange bedfellows on every page: as Flaubert's life is revealed to be mirrored in his art, as Braithwaite's art borrows from Flaubert's, as Flaubert's art encroches on Braithwaite's life, and so on in ever more remarkable permutations. Derived from a Kirkus review: Sly, quite witty, and very smart: an elegant meditation on the precincts of Art and Life, embodied in that great polar-bear of these two antipodes-Flaubert. English critic and novelist Barnes gives over the narration of this playful but quite serious literary investigation to a fictional retired doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, an amateur Flaubert scholar whose wife has recently committed suicide. Braithwaite is a dazzling, easy-going, discriminating guide-whether tracking down the stuffed parrot Flaubert kept on his desk or giving poor maligned Louise Colet a rebuttal opportunity, whether discussing friends. . . or the place of trains in Flaubert's life. As criticism of criticism, too, the novel is deliciously sane and supple, especially when skewering critics from Sartre to Enid Starkie-who complained that the color of Emma Bovary's eyes changes on different pages of the novel. Braithwaite's tangential dictates against fashion in fiction will delight anyone who knows the territory. Indeed, Braithwaite/Barnes is continuously entertaining and telling-as he acidly dismisses some of the many stupid "accepted ideas" about Flaubert, as he drily satirizes literary obtuseness in its assorted flavors. So-for connoisseurs of Flaubert or of fiction generally: an economical, balanced, gliding defense of the artist and his art-cast in an oddly undefinable form that's very special but never precious. David Hockney (Jacket art) (illustrator).…

Condition: Good. 8vo. Dust Jacket Only. Very Good. 2.00 Pounds Sterling on flyleaf. [First Edition].