Before She Met Me

By: Julian Barnes

Narrated by: Simon Vance

At the start of this fiendishly comic and suspenseful novel, a mild-mannered English academic chuckles as he watches his wife commit adultery. The action takes place before she met him. But lines between film and reality, past and present become terrifyingly blurred in this sad and funny tour de force from the author of Flaubert’s Parrot.

©1982 Julian Barnes (P)2020 Recorded Books

Not his best effort

While Barnes at his worst is better than most at their best this is not a great book. It would seem that having conjured a cute premise he dared himself to write a novel about it. He lost. The book has a number of amusing riffs but does not jell into a coherent whole or present believable characters.

50% Pleasure, 50% Disappointment

The first part of the book is brilliant, engaging, irresistible: one doesn't want to put it down (or, rather, click "stop"). Then it starts to go in an unexpected direction that isn't consistent with the initial tone of the story. I am not afraid of twists and surprises in a novel: but the way this one ends clashes with what appeared to be the genre embraced at the start by the author. In view of this second part, the first might as well not have been there. Why tell us so lengthily about the first marriage if, later on, this doesn't mean anything to the development of the events and it doesn't help us know the main character particularly better?

Having said that, the writing itself--the use of language, the elegant description, and some genius one-liners or phrases--is amazing.

I am slowly buying everything read by Simon Vance. He is my favorite male reader on Audible. Absolutely fantastic.