Talking It Over

First edition. 8vo. Pp. [viii], 273, [5 (blank)]. Beige cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine; sky-blue endpapers. Jacket design by Peter Dyer, bearing an illustration by Fraser Taylor (priced £13.99 net to front flap). The trade edition, published in a print run of 24,000.

Signed by Author to title page.

Author's sixth novel. Winner of the 1992 Prix Femina Étranger prize. Adapting the convention of the epistolary novel, Barnes puts a contemporary love triangle under the microscope through the ingenious device of juxtaposed monologues, with each character providing complementary and contradictory versions of a shared past. The distribution of power in the triangular relationship can vary according to the degree of reliability the reader grants each protagonist.

Barnes suggested he may have been influenced by the 1950 film Rashômon by Akira Kurosawa, adapted from the 1915 novella by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, in which contradictory interpretations of the same events are contrasted without an authorial imprimatur applied as to the veracity of each.

Several reviewers also found echoes of the love triangle in François Truffaut's seminal 1962 film, Jules et Jim – adapted from the 1953 novel by Henri-Pierre Roché. However, Barnes begs to differ: "I always resist the idea that Talking It Over is an homage to or a reworking of Jules et Jim. When it comes, it's a sort of necessary joke, it's a passing illusion [...] it was more a sort of wink."

A much darker sequel named Love, etc, followed a decade later – what should have been the title of the original. Barnes demurred in its use after finding out a 1979 American novel by Bel Kaufman already bore this title. His French publishers though had no such qualms and went on with the original title, which put them in somewhat of a bind when the sequel came out, which they then published as Dix ans après [Ten Years Later]. The acclaimed 1996 French film adaptation, directed by Marion Vernoux with Charlotte Gainsbourg, Yvan Attal and Charles Berling, also used Love, etc.

"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

[Guignery, Vanessa. The Fiction of Julian Barnes. Readers' Guides. Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006]