Product Description

At the start of this fiendishly comic and suspenseful novel, a mild-mannered English academic chuckles as he watches his wife commit adultery. The action takes place she met him. But lines between film and reality, past and present become terrifyingly blurred in this sad and funny tour de force from the author of Flaubert's Parrot.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #329464 in Books
• Published on: 1992-10-27
• Released on: 1992-10-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From the Inside Flap
At the start of this fiendishly comic and suspenseful novel, a mild-mannered English academic chuckles as he watches his wife commit adultery. The action takes place before she met him. But lines between film and reality, past and present become terrifyingly blurred in this sad and funny tour de force from the author of Flaubert's Parrot.

About the Author
Julian Barnes was born in Leicester in 1946 and educated in London and Oxford. He worked as a lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary, then as a journalist for the New Statesman, the Sunday Times and the Observer. He is the author of eight novels, a collection of essays, a book of short stories, and is the first Englishman to have won both the Prix Medicis and the Prix Femina. In 1988 he was made a Chevalier and in 1995 he became an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Customer Reviews

Great British Humor
Before She Met Me is a book filled with the great British humor of Julian Barnes. It has its flaws, to be sure, but they are minor ones. One of the characters is truly reprehensible, but his appearances are so few and far between that I think his horrid behavior can easily be overlooked.

What bothered me more, with this book, were the female characters. One of them seems quite true to life but the other one did not. She seemed wooden, a cardboard cutout. Barnes is a terrific writer, but in my opinion, he has yet to create a believable, good, female character.

The writing in this book is really first rate British humor (I expect it may be too British for some). It is an escapist book but I don't think that should lessen its importance. After all, don't we all need to escape now and then?

If you want to laugh and have a little fun, if you want to forget your troubles for awhile, then try Before She Met Me. It might do you a world of good. It did me.

Appreciating the Present...
Some people just like to go and dig the stories of the past, they just seem insecure of how well the present is behaving, and they need to find something wrong in it. I wonder if that has to do with trying to maintain that worrying factor that they got used to...

anyways, Graham is one of those guys, after believing that he has it all going the way he wanted, his wife (Barbara) deliberatly starts building some doubts in him. These doubts grow and he loses the touch of enjoying his present, he keeps on wondering about a past, that really is not clear to him, but he never fails to build his own conculsions...

Ann tries her best to keep Graham living the present, make him see what he has and not to be carried away with his emotions and how that would impact the future.

The end of the story is stunning, and leaves no doubts about what the future holds...

Postmodern Othello
Barnes's novel is yet another instance postmodern intertextuality (like A Thousand Acres, Mary Reily, Wide Sargasso Sea); here, the novel, on a subtle level, appears to revise Shakespeare's Othello in its emphasis on pathological male sexual jealousy. Here, however, the Iago is not another character, but the protagonist's own "reptile brain" that drives him to sexual obsession and violence. A fascinating and engaging but bruising book.