Talking It Over (30 page)

BOOK: Talking It Over

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I looked in the mirror. She was still standing there, in the middle of the street, one hand holding the baby to her, the other hand pressing a handkerchief against the blood on her face. I drove. She was still there. I drove like a maniac, or as fast as a maniac can given that he’s forgotten to change out of second gear. Then I two-wheeled the bend by the Cave Coopérative and the sight of her was gone.

Mme Rives
Sont fous, les Anglais
. That Canadian who took room 6 and only went out after dark: he was English. He told me twice he was Canadian but then he left his passport lying around when the girl and I went in to make up his room and he hadn’t even told us his real name. He’d changed it. He was very silent, stayed in his room for a week, and when he left he shook my hand, smiled for the first time, and said he was happy.

And that young couple who bought old Benin’s house. They appeared to be sympathetic, she was very proud of her baby, he was very proud of that stupid old Peugeot which kept breaking down. I told him one day that he ought to get a little Renault 5 like everyone else. He told me he had renounced the modern world. He used to say stupid things like that, although in a perfectly charming way.

Then what happens? They’ve been here six months, people are beginning to like them, when they have a screaming quarrel in the middle of the street. Everyone stops to look.
Finally, he hits her twice across the face, jumps into his old car and drives off. She stands in the middle of the road for about five minutes, with blood on her face, then goes back into the house and doesn’t come out again. That is the last we see of her. A week later they clear everything out and disappear. My husband said the English are a mad and violent race, and their sense of humour is very singular. The house is for sale: it’s that one over there, you see? Let’s hope we get someone sensible next time. If it has to be a foreigner, give us a Belgian.

Nothing much has happened in the village since. Lagisquet’s dog got run down by a car. The dog was deaf and Lagisquet was an old fool. We told him he ought to tie the dog up. He said he didn’t want to interfere with Poulidor’s freedom and happiness. Well, he’s interfered with its freedom and happiness now. He opened the front door, the dog shot out, and a car ran it over. Some people were sympathetic to Lagisquet. I wasn’t. I said, ‘You’re an old fool. You’ve probably got English blood.’

ALSO BY
J
ULIAN
B
ARNES

BEFORE SHE MET ME

At the start of this novel, an English academic chuckles as he watches his wife commit adultery in a silly, low-budget movie she made years before she met him. But as he combs the theaters for other instances of his wife’s cinematic betrayal, the line between film and reality, past and present, love and mania becomes terrifyingly blurred.

Fiction/Literature/

CROSS CHANNEL

Between England and France lies a narrow body of water and a vast sea of prejudice and misapprehension. This is the distance that Julian Barnes’s English characters try to cross in these playfully ironic short stories. But what they discover alongside the rich food and barbarous sexual practices is their own ineradicable Englishness.

Fiction/Literature/

ENGLAND, ENGLAND

Imagine an England in which all the pubs are quaint, the Windsors behave themselves (mostly), and the cliffs of Dover are actually white, and where Robin Hood and his merry men really are merry. This is precisely what visionary tycoon Sir Jack Pitman seeks to accomplish on the Isle of Wight, a “destination” where tourists can find replicas of Big Ben (half size), Princess Di’s grave, and even Harrod’s.

Fiction/Literature/

FLAUBERT’S PARROT

An elegant work of literary imagination involving a cranky, erudite amateur scholar’s obsessive search for the truth about Gustave Flaubert,
Flaubert’s Parrot
also investigates the scholar himself, whose passion for the page is fed by personal bitterness—and whose life seems oddly to mirror those of Flaubert’s characters.

Fiction/Literature/

A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 10½
CHAPTERS

Beginning with a revisionist account of the voyage of Noah’s ark (narrated by one of its passengers) and ending with a sneak preview of heaven, Julian Barnes’s tour de force is a complete, unsettling, and frequently exhilarating vision of the world.

Fiction/Literature/

THE LEMON TABLE

In his acclaimed collection of stories, Barnes addresses what is perhaps the most poignant aspect of the human condition: growing old. The characters are facing the ends of their lives—some with bitter regret, others with resignation, and others still with defiant rage.

Fiction/Short Stories/

LETTERS FROM LONDON

Formidably articulate and outrageously funny,
Letters from London
is international voyeurism at its best—a peek into the British mindset from the vantage point of one of the most erudite and witty British minds.

Literature/Nonfiction/

LOVE, ETC
.

After a decade in America, Stuart returns to London and looks up his ex-wife Gillian. Their relationship had ended years before when Stuart’s former best friend Oliver stole her away. But now Stuart finds that the intervening years have left both Oliver’s artistic ambitions and his relationship in ruins, and he suspects that he may be able to undo the results of their betrayal.

Fiction/Literature/

METROLAND

In this giddy comedy of sexual awakening in the sixties, Julian Barnes follows Chris and Toni from precocious adolescence in a stultifying London suburb, through Chris’s deflowering in Paris during the earth-shaking
événements
of 1968, and back to Metroland, where he finds himself breaking bread with the same classmates he once sneered at.

Fiction/Literature/

THE PORCUPINE

Stoyo Petkanov, the deposed Communist Party leader, is on trial for everything from corruption to political murder. His guilt would seem to be self-evident, but, as imagined by Barnes, his trial illuminates the shadowy frontier between the rusted myths of the Communist past and a capitalist future in which everything is up for grabs.

Fiction/Literature/

SOMETHING TO DECLARE
Essays on France and French Culture

Barnes’s appreciation extends from France’s vanishing peasantry to its hyper-literate pop singers, from the gleeful iconoclasm of
nouvelle vague
cinema to the orgy of drugs and suffering that is the Tour de France. Above all, Barnes is an unparalleled connoisseur of French writing and writers. Here are the prolific and priapic Simenon, Baudelaire, Sand, and Sartre, and several dazzling excursions on the prickly genius of Flaubert.

Literature/Travel/

STARING AT THE SUN

Jean Serjeant, the heroine of this wonderfully provocative novel, seems ordinary, but has an extraordinary disdain for received wisdom. And as we follow Jean from her childhood in the 1920s to her flight into the sun in the year 2021, we are confronted with the fruits of her quietly relentless curiosity.

Fiction/Literature

TALKING IT OVER

Through the indelible voices of three narrators—stolid Stuart; glamorous, epigrammatic Oliver; and the cryptic beauty Gillian, who has the bad luck to love them both—Julian Barnes reimagines the romantic triangle as a weapon whose edges cut like razor blades.

Fiction/Literature