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: #289299 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.

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.

No One Escapes�
I am well into reading a sixth book by Mr. Julian Barnes, so while I may have yet to complete his entire body of work, I do think I can say this is not only a dark exception to his writing, but contains topics that are deviant. Individual conduct may be more appropriate than topic, as the most bazaar behavior is reserved for one player. Others in this book are eccentric bordering on the repugnant, but no literary rules states we must like who we read about.

For example, if a writer/amateur psychologist, who revels in his flatulence can be endured, you will get through the book. There is no gray area with this particular character, no compromise, be amused, or be repelled, those are the options. There are many other minor players that all are people you would not miss meeting, however the main character will test your thresholds for the bizarre.

A man marries for the second time. He brings to this union his own history of relationships with women from earliest unfulfilled fantasies, to complete biblical knowledge of his female counterparts. Like her Husband, the Wife too brings her own life experiences both real, and the fictional, as her career as a "minor actress" occasioned the illusion of intimacy on the screen of silver.

As his curiosity of seeing an old film, becomes an obsession of repeated viewings, and videotaped collecting, the Husband departs reality, pauses for bizarre ritual, and finally plummets with finality.

The effort here is tolerating the sideshow freakish behavior that is repellent. If the reader can do so, the reward of this writer's skill is the only satisfaction you will have. This is certainly not a book I would recommend as an introduction to this man's work. If this were the first of his I came upon, it surely would have been the last. However once read in the context of his body of work, while divergent, annoying, and filled with players who may only gain your contempt, the effort is worth it.