Product Description

In this powerfully affecting Flaubert's Parrot gives readers a brilliant take on the deceptions that make up the quivering substrata of erotic love. "An interplay of serious thought and dazzling wit. . . . It's moving, it's funny, it's frightening . . . fiction at its best."--New York Times Book Review.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #364591 in Books
• Published on: 1992-10-27
• Released on: 1992-10-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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.

From Library Journal
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.

From Kirkus Reviews
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.

Customer Reviews

A great read
Barnes was criticised when this book was published for using a gimmick, and for being lightweight reading.

The criticism is totally unfounded - this really is a quality book.

It is a classic menage a trois, told in the first person by all three characters. The different views of identical events is entertaining and sometimes hilarious, and the love story will be familiar to everyone.

The characters are very real and you have met all of them (or at least parts of all of them) in your real life, and this gives the book real resonance.

I have read it three times (its extremely rare for me to read any book more than once), and it is easy to open a page at random and read a few pages.

Its impossible to read this book without smiling.

Highly recommended!

Ready To Be a Confidant�
Prepared or not, while you still must read, what you read is almost entirely directed to you. You are told what has happened, what your new friends think, and what they are to do. Turn the page and then be told of the effect their actions were upon another of your new acquaintances. This book almost becomes interactive. If it were to be read to you, instead of by you, you would undoubtedly answer, interrupt and question them, and then yourself for talking to those who are not there. You would likely take sides, and wish you could conspire to help the party you favor.

The Author Julian Barnes places you in the midst of a triangle, albeit one with tangential appendages, and the story that transpires is only a bit less unusual than the form the book takes. The reader is expected to be the listener, provide a shoulder, and sometimes to refuse the proffered cigarette less neutrality is to be compromised. The menagerie Mr. Barnes provides as your newfound pals, range from the mundane, to the brilliantly eccentric, and when brought together form an eclectic group. The cameos played by the briefest of speakers often come under the heading "He/she lies like an eyewitness". All believe they speak the truth, but truth is relative, perspective is everything.

Mr. Barnes is egalitarian as you are chosen to lend your sympathetic ear to men, women, the young and the not so young. He also offers the occasional insight from a player whose appearance doesn't even rate that of a cameo, florists as psychologists.

He also takes the most familiar range of human emotion and demonstrates with an ease that is a bit disconcerting, how double edged and painful they can be, This is true whether he cuts a swath with a broadsword, or slips a stiletto from the hand of one friend to the vitals of another.

Triangles are used to describe the actions between 3 individuals. Mr. Barnes uses the same shape, but the complexity of his writing requires more than one. A pyramid might result, at once the most stable of shapes, and repeatedly pointed as well.

A wonderful commentator on the human condition.

Funny, sexy and well written
"He lies like an eye-witness" Russian saying. This quote appears on the frontispiece of this enjoyable novel. The opening words of the novel are:" My name is Stuart, and I remember everything." So I, dear reader, was sucked in straight away. It's a first person narrative from the point of view of the three main characters (the eternal triangle?) Gillian, Stuart and Oliver. If you are familiar with the Japanese film masterpiece RASHOMON you will be familiar with the premise. This book will make your day a little bit brighter. Delicious and sympathetic humour.