Flobear at 200 by Julian Barnes.

Beginnings

In the early 1960s, my maternal grandparents were living in what estate agents call a shale

bungalow on the outskirts of Beaconsfield.

The house was a new build in the sloping half-acre of woodland. My highly practical

grandfather cleared an area of trees halfway down the slope, laid a concrete base, and built a

summer house which he painted light blue. I can't remember any furniture except for some kind

of daybed on which grandma would take a

siesta in the summer. A musty smell suggested that it didn't get much other use, but it was here,

on this bed, in this appropriately suburban setting, that I read Madame Beauvary for the first time.

I would have been fifteen or sixteen. The book wasn't my own choice.

An iconoclastic Englishmaster, just down from Cambridge, had given us a reading list which,

to our surprise, contained foreign authors. And I had high hopes of Madame Bovary. It still had

the reputation of being a hot book. After all, it had been

prosecuted for outrageous public morals when it first appeared serially in the Review de Paris.

France, a married woman, adultery. As we didn't say then, what's not to like? I read the novel in its penguin translation.

Back then, their classics were distinguished by the overall jacket colour.

Green for France, red for Russia, olive green for Germany, purple and brown for the classical

world, and so on.

The book was too subtle for me, of course, and I failed to find it at all

erotic. I doubt I understood the scene in the closed cab, let alone the metonymic burst of

white paper shooting from the window at its shrouded climax. But something remained from my

...