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Book Reviewed by:The bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending delivers "fiction at its best" (The New York Times Book Review) in an unforgettable novel about two best friends and the beautiful woman who comes between them.
First there's Stuart, stolid, conventional, but not quite so dull as he pretends to be. Then there is Oliver, his glamorous, epigrammatic best friend. And veering wildly between them is Gillian, the cryptic beauty who marries Stuart and then astonishes everyone by falling in love with Oliver. These three are at once the protagonists and the hilariously unreliable "eye-witnesses" of this funny, elegant, and affecting novel by bestselling author Julian Barnes, which reimagines the romantic triangle as a weapon whose edges cut like razor blades.
True to the title, Barnes emphasizes the (faux) oral nature of his text. The reader takes the place of a priest or therapist, hearing verbal confessions. Every so often, a protagonist will become aware of the interlocutor, answering a straight question or consciously refuting what he or she imagines one of the others has said about an incident. All three narratives are looping and indirect, yet keep coming back to the details of how their connections were formalized, broken, and reformed...continued
Full Review
(931 words)
(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
Love triangles—stories in which one person must decide between two possible partners or embarks on a forbidden romance while bound to someone else—have been central to literature for millenia: In Greek mythology, Helen was married to King Menelaus of Sparta but, by some accounts, fell in love with Paris and joined him in Troy (in other versions, she was abducted); her remarriage is said to have caused the Trojan War. The Book of Genesis sets up a rivalry between Jacob's two wives, sisters Leah and Rachel, that continues into the next generation. Ancient Celtic legend tells of Guinevere's betrayal of King Arthur with one of his trusted knights, Lancelot, leading to the downfall of Camelot.
These classical cases exemplify ...
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