This novel is about a biographer who visits Rouen to explore museums dedicated to Gustave Flaubert. He discovers that two different museums have a stuffed parrot on display, and both claim they have THE parrot Flaubert had on his desk for a few weeks while writing about a parrot. The writer becomes obsessed with tracking down the truth about which parrot Flaubert had on his desk.
The novel explores Flaubert's life, and in my opinion is a cheap trick to con novel-readers into reading and buying a biography on Gustave Flaubert. Despite the framing of the biography within the context of the writer-character's efforts to understand what happened with Flaubert's parrot, one could easily forget that many of the chapters were within a fiction book. Considering how much better novels sell compared with biographies, it does make sense to try to pass off a biography as a novel, and in this case the result even landed on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. ( )

This is a book that is hard to define. Is it a biography of Flaubert? Is it a literary criticism of Flaubert's work? Is it the quest to find Flaubert's stuffed parrot? Is it actually the narrator's (an English doctor) story? Is it a criticism of literary criticism?

I just wasn't sure what to make of it. There were parts of this that I really enjoyed, and parts were really amusing. And then at the end the narrator sort of ties things together by giving some insight into his personal life. But there were also parts that I was really bored with and did not care about at all.

In the end, I think I say the book is amusing and clever, but a bit too "intellectual for the sake of being intellectual" for my taste. ( )

This book had some very erudite passages in addition to some that were laugh-out-loud funny. I would have rated this book higher if it weren't for the many parts that were ramblings of a man sorting through his own grief. ( )

I was hoping for a mélange of ornithological oddities à la façon de “The Curse of the Labrador Duck” and Flaubertian anecdotes. I should have saved myself the effort and read a Flaubert biography instead for I would have enjoyed it more ( )

A view of the 'stable but hopeless' quality of our lives, the search for ourselves in past lives, the search for meaning in our own: the better search is for the beauty and truth in art -- consolation vs desolation. Using a biography of Flaubert as both mask and muse, the narrator hides and reveals his own thoughts on relationships, historical truth, writers, and our obsessive need for facts to obscure our own private truths: the 'religion of despair.' The closer we get to the past in depth, the wider the expanse becomes, stable but hopeless Great quotes from Flaubert really make one relate to Flaubert and want to read his works. Good use of call-backs and one line chapter endings to summarize, ironically, and set up for proceeding call-backs and theme. ( )