Flaubert's Parrot is a massive lumber room of detail about the great man: in it we learn an enormous amount about his life, family, lovers, thought processes, health and obsessions. But the voice that tells us all this is gradually revealed to be itself in the grip of an obsession. The voice is that of Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired doctor with a nagging need to rationalise his wife's suicide, and a more obscure compulsion to anatomise the processes of human identity
