Talking it over [Paperback]

In Talking it Over, Julian Barnes, acclaimed author of Flaubert's Parrot and Metroland, turns his attention to a peculiarly English ménage a trois. Stuart and Oliver have been friends since school. Stuart is painfully aware that "We're rather different, Oliver and me, Oliver impresses people", especially women, so when shy, awkward Stuart meets and marries the beautiful Gillian, an uneasy threesome develops between the two old friends and the new woman in their lives. Gradually the flamboyant Oliver realises "I'm in love with Gillie. I'm amazed, I'm overawed, I'm poo-scared".

As the emotional and sexual complications of their lives begin to unravel, the three characters takes it in turns to deliver monologues and the unfolding action to the reader, leading to repeated backtracking and reassessment of what has actually happened on the part of the reader, as the characters offer different perceptions of the same events. The book's epigraph is "He lies like an eye-witness", which could be applied to all three characters, as Gillian increasingly falls for Oliver and Stuart sinks into misery and dejection. The shocking denouement fails to prevent a feeling that, however brilliantly Barnes draws his three characters, there is very little in them with which to sympathise or identify, leaving the novel feeling like a deft but rather empty exercise in style. Nevertheless, Barnes fans will enjoy Barnes' typically elegant and mordant style and wit. --Jerry Brotton --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

The members of a love triangle take turns narrating this ingenious novel from British author Barnes, whose earlier works Metroland and Before She Left Me will also be released in Vintage International editions this October.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Stuart Hughes and Oliver Russell have been friends since childhood. When the fiscally astute but socially inept Stuart meets the beautiful and artistic Gillian Wyatt at a London wine bar, Oliver can hardly believe it. Gillian clearly deserves someone more cultured, more sophisticated--someone more like Oliver himself. Oliver tags along on the couple's first dates, stands as best man at their wedding, and only when it is too late declares his love for his best friend's wife. It's rather like a British version of the film Jules and Jim , he jokes. In fact, the narrative strategy has more in common with TV documentary than prose fiction. The characters are "talking heads" who address the reader directly, in three autonomous though interrelated harangues. There is no omniscient narrator to interpret the story; each character is defined entirely by speech. A witty and provocative novel from the author of the masterpiece Flaubert's Parrot ( LJ 4/1/85). Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/91. --Ed ward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Barnes constructs a triangle here, then another one, upended- -in this chamber cantata of voices about adultery. Stuart is the stolid, financial-type best friend of the wildly fey and scene-making Oliver, a screenwriter. When Stuart meets feet-on-the-ground Gillian, an art conservator, they fall comfortably into modulated love. On the day they marry, though, Oliver is shaken out of his aesthetic prance-trance by the realization that he too has fallen in love with Gillian--but terribly, passionately, air-robbingly. He tells her so too--and the declared passion (though Oliver keeps away from her physically, a scruple) in quick succession works on stolid Gillian like an earthquake. Soon she's thrown Stuart over for Oliver (they marry, have a child), and it's Stuart's turn to be the devastated outsider in this unfortunate version of Jules et Jim. That film is mentioned more than once here, an overt reference point, along with much else that's French; not even in the wonderful Flaubert's Parrot has Barnes's Francophilism been used so much as strict sidebar to his work. Gillian has a French mother; it's to the French countryside that Oliver and Gillian move eventually; and the book is almost sopping with the literary form Barnes feels most at home with: the epigram. Sections, narrated by the two male principals, usually home in on a wry apercu, a cleverly economical philosophical reflection. Gillian's no-nonsense personality makes for an attractive exception, hers seeming the only true personage here; everyone else is too busy making Chamfort-like asides on the comedi‚ humaine to engage us. Barnes is fun, smart, even wise--but fiction, with its loose tags and sloppy surplus, isn't his specialty. He neatens away its essences. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Few writers think and talk so beguilingly. This book is wonderfully funny. An intelligent. And moving Independent on Sunday Quick-silver clever and allusive The Times Scintillating... It's funny, quick on the draw, and know when to soften the gaze. It reads so smoothly, the pages seem to flip themselves Observer A writer of rare intelligence. He catches the detail of contemporary life with an uncanny forensic skill... He is, as always, a superb ironist, a connoisseur of middling, muddling, modern England London Review of Books A wonderfully wistful and funny novel Daily Telegraph --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Born in Leicester in 1946, Julian Barnes is the author of nine novels, a book of stories, and a collection of essays. He has won both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Fémina, and in 1988 was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

This tour de force of alternating monologues tells the story of Stuart, who marries Gillian; of his clever and nasty best friend, Oliver, who can't believe Stuart should be so lucky and quickly decides that, actually, he must have Gillian himself; and of course, of Gillian, who is in the middle. Each of these characters talks in turn to an unknown listener: explaining, excusing, blaming, protesting, rejoicing, regretting. It's an essentially theatrical, rather than narrative, exercise. And wonderfully, instead of having it read to us, Chivers has cast three impeccable actors, Steven Pacey, Alex Jennings, and Clare Higgins to play with and against each other, and there isn't a false note anywhere. A wonderful performance. B.G. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.