Herald-Sun 14/8/04

Love and power, working for the UN

      BARNES would not be surprised that it is on the seventh day of the seventh month, the day she turns 77, that I read of her life-changing birthday in Geneva. Several coincidences run through the matter of fact memoir of the multilingual. British-born, world-bred author who now lives on the south coast of New South Wales with her second husband. It was a work colleague who, through a road accident in Geneva, met the man who invited Barnes to the United Nations to work as an interpreter. It was another accident that later landed her in the coveted career of simultaneous interpretation.

      The girl who once thought a passionate life was the stuff of dreams was now living it. Barnes. who also speaks French. Spanish and Russian. gives us a vivid inside look at the adrenalin-charged, jet-setting lifestyle of an Interpreter and her privileged position of hearing what the world has yet to learn.

     In her story driven by anecdotes rather than language. she tells of her travels to exotic destinations where she dines with heads of state and is offered the role of 14th wife by one of them. She tells of tangoing her way through Argentina. kicking up her heels in Spain and having caviar and lemon tea for breakfast in bed in Isfahan. She introduces us to her husband's mistresses, with her English reserve that has no room for direct rage, and takesus into the sensual studio of her Polish lover. On a trip to India she meets a turbaned. robed man who tells her that her 26-year marriage is about to be turned on its head ... on her birthday.