While I still feel this book is fairly dry and incoherent when it comes to storyline (seeing as there is none). I found that while we were discussing this book in class, I started remembering a post where the person was talking about how this was similar to a "mystery." During the discussion I started realizing that the way Geoffrey Braithwaite talks is almost like those scenes where the pyschopath is being interrogated and says almost nothing in his defense. It seems reminiscent of these because there is a story that he could be talking about, but he constantly puts it off and goes off on another random-seeming tangent about Flaubert. If this IS the case which I start to feel that it more and more is, this book's intellectual quality is the fact that mayber there are clues about this Braithwaite within his reasoning for being obsessed with Flaubert and particularly which parts of Flaubert fascinates him. This also lends a possible explanation to the three chronologies (even though it could just be that this is a "postmodern" novel and indeterminancy is the main point) because it might show the obsession that he went and found ALL these "facts" out, or could just be making them up to fit his picture of Flaubert.
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Interesting post. I'm a bit behind in responding, so am not sure where in the novel you were when you wrote this. However, I wonder if you've gotten to the "Pure Story" section (the stuff about his wife Ellen), and whether or not you feel that the 'mystery' is beginning to be solved (at least, to the extent that a postmodernist would allow for such solutions). Maybe psychopath isn't the right terms. Maybe Braithwaite is simply overcome by grief--both at his wife's suicide AND at the pit that she, apparently, couldn't stand to stare into, but on whose edge we all seem perched.
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