The End of the Affair (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Graham Greene

ISBN 10: 0142437980 / ISBN 13: 9780142437988

Edité par Penguin Classics August 2004, 2004

A propos de cet article

Graham Greene's End of the Affair is ostensibly a cinematic mystery in need of solving. Set in medias res shortly after WWII, the story flashes back to the The Blitz of London via the narrator's memory and the stolen journal of his lover, Sarah Miles, who leaves him without word or explanation. Greene's mystery morphs into a piercingly sustained account of Sarah's wrestling journey with faith, to faith. 'I've caught belief like a disease,' she writes in her diary, a simple recognition that she has embarked upon the way of suffering (almost without her consent). Greene's portrait of a woman enjoying adultery, without guilt--a scandal in its time--suggests that Sarah has been led to belief through a mortal sin. As Michael Gorra puts it in the introduction, the 'erotic experience has brought her to a knowledge of the divine and even into a state of grace.' For most of the book, Greene leaves the door just slightly ajar. A series of 'miracles' might be coincidences. He almost batters Maurice (the primary narrator and Sarah's lover) into belief himself, and it's never quite clear if Maurice holds out (against God) in the end. Green's narrative choices aside, The End of the Affair belongs in the ranks of his finest works, both for his sharply drawn characters and for the portion of the book written as excerpts from Sarah's diary. The antithetical, though not contradictory, poles of love and hate are both means of grace. As Sarah writes: 'You [God] willed our separation, but he [Maurice] willed it too. He worked for it with his anger and his jealousy, and he worked for it with his love. For he gave me so much love, and I gave him so much love that soon there wasn't anything left, when we'd finished, but You. For either of us.even the first time, in the hotel near Paddington, we spent all we had. You were there, teaching us to squander, like You taught the rich man, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You for pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him my peace--he needs it more.'.

N° de réf. du vendeur 74344

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: The End of the Affair (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
• Éditeur: Penguin Classics August 2004
• Date de parution: 2004
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0142437980
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780142437988
• Reliure: Paper Back
• État de l'article: New
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • Novels & Stories

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

Note de l'éditeur : il s'agit d'une édition spéciale reliée qui peut présenter des pages irrégulières/mal massicotées. Il s'agit d'un choix de l'éditeur et de l'auteur. "This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, and it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous affair with Sarah Miles—a hate bred of a passion that ultimately lost out to God.

Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exorcise the persistence of passion by retracing its course from obsessive love to love-hate. At the start he believes he hates Sarah and her husband, Henry. By the end of the book, Bendrix's hatred has shifted to the God he feels has broken his life but whose existence he has at last come to recognize.

Originally published in 1951, The End of the Affair was acclaimed by William Faulkner as "for me one of the best, most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody's language." 

À propos de l'auteur

Graham Greene (1904-1991), whose long life nearly spanned the length of the twentieth century, was one of its greatest novelists. Educated at Berkhamsted School and Balliol College, Oxford, he started his career as a sub-editor of The Times of London. He began to attract notice as a novelist with his fourth book, Orient Express, in 1932. In 1935, he trekked across northern Liberia, his first experience in Africa, recounted in A Journey Without Maps (1936). He converted to Catholicism in 1926, an edifying decision, and reported on religious persecution in Mexico in 1938 in The Lawless Roads, which served as a background for his famous The Power and the Glory, one of several “Catholic” novels (Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair). During the war he worked for the British secret service in Sierra Leone; afterward, he began wide-ranging travels as a journalist, which were reflected in novels such as The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Comedians, Travels with My Aunt, The Honorary Consul, The Human Factor, Monsignor Quixote, and The Captain and the Enemy. In addition to his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, two books of autobiography—A Sort of Life and Ways of Escape—two biographies, and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays and film and book reviews to The Spectator and other journals, many of which appear in the late collection Reflections. Most of his novels have been filmed, including The Third Man, which the author first wrote as a film treatment. Graham Greene was named Companion of Honour and received the Order of Merit among numerous other awards.

Michael Gorra is a professor of English at Smith College. His books include The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany and After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie.