p. 48: "polar bear-- preg."

I'm reading Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes. The copy I happen to be reading is a paperback I bought years ago, its pages accordingly yellowed. (Cheap paper, don't you know.) As is sometimes the case with used books, though the book itself bears no indelible traces of its previous owner(s), as soon as I picked it up and started reading it, I found something in its pages, probably used as a bookmark. Sometimes I find a bookstore receipts, or an old photograph, or a postcard, or a page of notes or even a shopping list. In this case, it's a business card, with Japanese characters on one side, and English on the other. (Heavy pasteboard, but as yellowed as the book's pages.) It's the card of a journalist, by name David T____, employed by a Japanese newspaper. On the card someone has jotted: p.48 polar bear--preg.

When I saw the page number, I didn't check it out. There was, after all, the possibility that the page number referred to another book entirely. When I got to the bottom of p. 48, though, that possibility was ruled out. "Among zoo-keepers, there is no known test for pregnancy in the polar bear."

Why in the world would anyone choose that particular reference to jot down? This made me a bit more curious about the card. What do you do when you're curious about someone you don't know? You go to Google, of course. So I did. There were four separate individuals with the name David T____ that was on the card who according to Google are living in the US. I'm not sure, though, that this particular David T_____ is actually living in the US. I'm sure this David T_____ is the person who's been published in numerous literary magazines (one of which even provides a photo of David T____ ) and apparently lives the life of an expatriate, moving from country to country, usually in Eastern Europe and Asia.

Having learned this, I then realized I'd been making an unwarranted assumption: viz., that the person whose name was on the card was the same person who'd been using the card as a bookmark for this copy of Flaubert's Parrot. No name had been inscribed in the book, after all. So for all I know, the person whose name was on the card (David T_____) might very well have given his card to the book's owner, who then found a use for it...

I don't quite understand why this card has become so interesting to me-- interesting enough, that is, to cast a shadow over my reading of the novel. But it's a fact that I keep wondering if, by the time I finish reading the book, I'll have discovered some extraordinary significance to "polar bear--preg" on p. 48. Certainly, Barnes is pushing numerous associations between Flaubert and various animals. Perhaps, just perhaps, that sentence will prove to be the key to understanding the novel. Once I'm finished, of course...