Talking It Over (Picador Books): Amazon.de: Julian Barnes: Englische Bücher

Amazon.co.uk

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

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. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .

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THINKING IT OVER... I LOVE THAT BOOK! 28. Juli 2000

Von tina

Format:Taschenbuch

So far I've read it in 4 languages for more than 20 times. No point of repeating the good comments the other readers have already given to the writter. I'd like to encourage also the Greek/Italian/Danish speaking readers who are not so familiar to English language to read the book in their language without fear. There is nothing missing from the original! Compliments to the translators! They must be as brilliant as Barnes, to give the culture, spirit and black-humour of his into another language and still make sense! I furthermore suggest to everybody to RE-READ IT and you will be surprised to find yourself more in accordance with another character than you first did. That's really impressing! Because in this book there isn't any main character to lead you his way, it doesn't talk about good and bad guys, actually the book doesn't talk at all! Open it and become a witness! The tird eye! It's THEM talking it over...

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Brilliant 25. Juni 1997

Von Ein Kunde

Barnes takes as his message a Russian proverb, "He lied like an eye-witness" and gives brutally honest accounts of the relationships between three people articulated by each of them, proving that there is no objective truth in life. Towards the end we even get to hear various minor characters giving their versions of incidents and views on the personalities of the three. It's a very compelling story, wonderfully told

Julian Barnes Talking it over 14. Februar 2012

Von Asmodino

Barnes, Julian- Talking it Over

Eine Dreiecksbeziehung, zwei Freunde seit Jugendtagen, ein Mädchen. Eine Geschichte, unzählige Male im Leben so geschehen.
Nichts Ungewöhnliches.
Doch die Erzählweise des Autors ist ungewöhnlich und gibt der Novelle einen besonderen Reiz, eine andere Sicht auf das ablaufende Geschehen.
Die handelnden Personen berichten direkt dem Leser, sie sprechen unmittelbar zu ihm. Sie erläutern dem Leser ihre Sicht der Dinge. Einen eigentlichen Handlungsfaden gibt es nicht, keinen Erzähler.
Der Leser hat das Gefühl mittendrin zu sein, er ist tief einbezogen in das Beziehungsnetz. Er sieht alles ganz klar.
Die Novelle ist meisterhaft erzählt. Obwohl es eine alltägliche Liebesgeschichte ist, hält die Spannung bis zum Schluss. Wem gehören die Sympathien des Lesers? Allen drei Beteiligten gleichermaßen, man lernt sie intensiv kennen und in gewisser Weise lieben. So bleibt zuletzt ein Hauch von Melancholie.
Um mit Herrmann Hesse zu sprechen:
"Es ist eine alte Geschichte // Doch bleibt sie immer neu; // Und wem sie just passieret, // Dem bricht das Herz entzwei."