You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Sulfoblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

My guest this afternoon is Joaquin Barnes, the author most recently of Talking It Over,

published by Knapp, author as well of a history of the world in ten and a half chapters,

staring at the sun, Flaubert's Perret, and before we knew him, before she met me, and

Medreland. I thought I'd begin, well, I guess by saying this is a book about a triangular

love affair and disintegrating marriage. I remember once when I was going through something of the sort

myself and expressed, you know, complete bewilderment about what was happening to me. I was

talking to pulling kale, and she said, well, situations like this, Michael, are very difficult

for literary, bookish types, because we're used to reading books where we understand everything,

and in life when we go through these things, they're never explained to us, they're never

resolved, people disappear, and especially the people who won't talk to us while they break our

hearts. So this book, talking it over, is one in which all of the characters get to, more or less, say what was going on in their minds during those moments that life won't afford us, but that art will. I noticed, too, that there's a sentence that says this much more succinctly in

Flaubert's parrot, that books are where things are explained to us. Life is where they aren't.

Yes, when you said that, I thought, ah, Pauline Kale has been reading Flouber's parrot.

But surely this situation of being out of the know or in the dark, which the characters are in most of the time, is the position of most readers until things are revealed.

Readers usually are the ones who are waiting for the next revelation.

These characters, what is the situation here?

The characters are appealing to you, confiding to you?

Yes, the characters, it's an intimate novel, and therefore I wanted to make the relationship between characters and reader as intimate as possible.

...