The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Reading The Man in the Red Coat is like lounging in a sumptuously furnished room before an artfully murmuring fire, with an inexhaustible carafe of excellent wine, and a brilliant, wry, erudite friend. Your friend knows everyone and has read everything, and you slouch into your velvet chair as he regales you with stories and gossip and anecdotes about Belle Epoque Paris. Artists, actors, socialites, poets, poseurs, eccentrics, dandies, languid aristocrats, heiresses, politicians, novelists, and Dr. Samuel Pozzi… there’s something juicy or weird or fascinating about all of them, and he rambles from tale to tale, stopping by the way to explain about Oscar Wilde’s testimony, Pre-Raphaelite art, Dreyfus (Pozzi was Dreyfus’s physician), homosexuality, and whatever happened to Sarah Bernhardt’s amputated leg (Pozzi was one of Bernhardt’s lovers).
Barnes slily lets you know what he’s about, when he describes a notorious novel of the day by Huysmans called A Rebours (“Against the Grain”): “One of the originalities of A Rebours is how frequently it breaks off from its already slender narrative and diverts into essayistic mode. There are reflections on contemporary literature, on art and music…” (p. 39). The “slender narrative” here is the life of Dr. Samuel Pozzi, a “disgustingly handsome” and brilliant surgeon of the era, who wrote the first proper medical textbook on gynecology in France, with admonitions of antiseptic technique, of speaking with courtesy and honesty to your patients while always maintaining their dignity and privacy, and warming the speculum with warm sterile water before using it. And in essayistic mode, Barnes goes everywhere else. The book is delightfully illustrated with postcard portraits of contemporary celebrities, culled from the merchandiser Felix Potin’s chocolate package collection, a 19th century version of bubblegum or Pokemon trading cards (and yes, Pozzi was gorgeous).
The book rambles, wanders, and sometimes repeats itself. It is lush, discursive, something to have a cozy wallow in. If you want a straightforward scholarly biography, look elsewhere. But for a gossipy, articulate, slightly salacious, Francophilic, eccentric read, you can’t do better.
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