The Liar

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Lastly is Adrian’s time spent as a spy during Trefusis’s fake sabbatical to study the fricative shift in the English language. Told first as interspersed espionage bits in italics by a third-person omniscient narrator, the unidentified spy characters refer to each other in code names from the story of Helen of Troy, we are then in later chapters immersed in the intrigue. Many will find their banter delightfully comical; others will find them long-winded, as it’s clear they enjoy hearing themselves talk: Ik lees Het Nijlpaard van Stephen Fry. IN VERTALING. De omvang van deze ramp dringt slechts langzaamaan tot mij door. Het betekent dat ik nooit, NOOIT meer deze orgie van schuttingtaal, grotesk cynisme en platte seks, deze in vitriool, drijfmest en tien jaar oude whisky gedrenkte bladzijden voor de volle 100% zal kunnen smaken in de oorspronkelijke taal. Ik moet onmiddellijk stoppen met lezen tot ik een Engelse versie heb. MAAR IK KAN NIET STOPPEN! All the possibly psychological analysis aside, The Liar is a racing novel of thrilling heroics, less-than-tender romantic encounters, and staggeringly fabulous Wildian wit. The novel has a cynical and ironic tone which only a British novel can have, but it ultimately also has a heart. And despite the fact that the novel is twenty years old, it doesn’t feel dated. The sign of a good read, surely, is also that the reader immediately wants to read something else by the author, and this is exactly how I feel right now. As much as I enjoy (nay, love) reading, however, I would prefer an audio-version again when it comes to Stephen Fry’s writing; his reading aloud is simply priceless.

Everything he saw became a symbol of his own existence, from a rabbit caught in headlights to raindrops racing down a window pane. Perhaps it was a sign that he was going to become a poet or a philosopher: the kind of person who, when he stood on the seashore, didn’t see waves breaking on a beach, but saw the surge of human will or the rhythms of copulation, who didn’t hear the sound of the tide but heard the eroding roar of time and the last moaning sign of humanity fizzing into nothingness. But perhaps it was a sign, he also thought, that he was turning into a pretentious wanker.

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This book talks very easily about homo-erotic themes, which was refresing to me. I did not come across many books that take such sexual themes in the matter of fact way this book does yet. In my opinion the book handled those themes well. am I so different from anyone else?…Doesn’t everyone just rearrange patterns? Ideas can’t be created or destroyed, surely.’ Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. After graduation, Adrian attends a farcical meeting where he and other attendees discuss the arrest of Trefusis, who was arrested on charges of cottaging, sabotaging the footage of an onlooking BBC film crew. It is later revealed that he was actually undertaking a document exchange preceded by two kisses on the cheek as is custom in several European countries, such as Hungary. The novel is semi-autobiographical and many scenes echo experiences later recounted in Fry's memoir, Moab is My Washpot. [1] The character Trefusis was created by Fry for several humorous radio broadcasts on BBC Radio 4's Loose Ends.

I love Stephen Fry. He’s a charming, funny TV man. Sadly, what makes him appealing on TV doesn’t translate well into literature. I wasn't sure what to make of this to begin with, but I found it increasingly brilliant as I went along.This book was a total mess spanning more than one timeline, without making you feel as if you realized that, because you didn’t, or you did too late. And you realized too late that the idea behind it is much farther than the humour and the ‘game’. I tell you, this book is a chronic liar too. So, what actually is the game? Is Fry aiming for a certain effect, or is this just a lazily tossed-off first novel which fails to hang together only because its author failed to care? Taken individually, I found all the chapters to be at least reasonably entertaining. There aren't too many other novels that I would think of in terms of which chapter was my favorite (it's Chapter Six—I highly recommend it and suspect it would remain quite enjoyable if you read it alone and gave the rest of the book a miss). Taken as a whole, the book fails miserably to cohere into any meaningful narrative.