Customer Reviews

The Records of the Original Proceedings of the Ohio Company, Volume II

5 star:		(99)
4 star:		(34)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The story of a woman lost between two men, a husband and a lover, told from the lover's point of view. The plot is dramatic, the characters unwittingly and wittingly involved in one of the most common human stories. Greene's writing style is perfect. There is not a word or an activity wasted, and at the same time the tale is beautifully and compellingly told. This book is an amazing example of the finest literary composition, but it is also fascinating in the acute and at times understated manner in which these three character's psychologies play together to enmesh the hearts of two men and the life of the woman. This is also a spiritual novel, asking questions while at the same time attempting answers. And throughout, there is a strong sense of honesty that one doesn't find in most romantic novels. The characters seem to be real persons, whose lives are not dramatic or dramatized, but related in all their smallness, their dissatisfaction, their quest for understanding, and that inexplicable desire for something more. I was surprised to find that this small book was such a satisfying as well as haunting read. Anyone planning to write fiction, particularly romance (not that silly fluff romance, but something meaningful), should become acquainted with this novel. It tells so much so very well.

Graham Greene's "The End Of The Affair" is one of the most powerful and gripping books I have read all year. If I had to describe in a word or a phrase what the novel is about, I'd say it's about the nature of love. Does love between human beings share the same source as that between Man and his creator ? The question of faith and Catholicism in particular has long been a favourite theme of Greene's and here he digs deep and mines it to the fullest. The novel's unique structure and way the love story between Maurice and Sarah is told with multiple flashbacks gives it an expansive romantic sweep that lends itself to cinematic adaptation. I have yet to see the film version but if it succeeds in capturing the essence of the novel, it promises to be breathtaking. Oddly enough, I detect shades of the grand love affair between Count Almasey and Katherine Clifton in "The English Patient". Just when you think the novel has reached its emotional climax, Greene surprises by going the extra mile to infuse the denouement with a deeply religious flavour that is simply brilliant. The execution is deftly handled, never threatening to overload the love story with heavy duty meaning. "The End Of The Affair" makes for wonderful reading. Don't miss it !

This was an excellent book. I plowed through it in one evening. A quick but powerful read.

The narrator is a near-successful writer living in London just before the start of WWII. Looking for inspiration for a novel about civil workers, he takes the wife of a fairly important civil worker out for dinner. She is interested in him, and this in turn sparks desire from him. They begin an affair that lasts throughout the war until the day the first V1 rockets fall. She breaks it off suddenly, without any reason known to the narrator. The husband never finds out, wrapped up in his work he does not even realize his marriage is more a friendship than anything.

Two years later, the narrator has had no contact at all with his lover. Until he runs into her troubled husband. They are only acquaintances, but the husband confides in the narrator his suspicions of another man. He thinks his wife is having an affair. The narrator hates his former lover, but jealousy now rears its head again. How could she take yet another lover after him? After their undying promises? He engages a private investigator to follow her.

All of this sounds fairly sordid. And it is. But love, real love, does flow through this novel. How difficult love is. How close love is to hate. How hatred can even be a twisted form of love. The two intense emotions are the flip sides of the same coin.

There are some good observations on the nature of writing itself. The narrator observes that most things are already written by the unconscious before the first word is put on paper. I find that to be true. Walking, sitting around, eating, reading, taking a shower, are all essential writing periods. The narrator has the habit of writing five hundred words a day, then stopping. Even in the middle of a sentence. I find that crazy. You ride the horse until it gets tired, or it runs away from you. Don't try to box it in.

About halfway through the novel, a twist anyone with half a brain can see coming occurs. From there the novel expands beyond the themes of adultery, love, and hate. The private investigator manages to steal the wife's journal. Now the former lover can peer into her heart and mind and read the truth. What he finds is nothing like what he expected.

Graham Greene struggled with his Catholicism his entire life. The sacred and the profane. The spirit and the flesh. Whether everything is just a coincidence. And the second half of this novel plays this struggle out in the love triangle.

In the end, an atheist finds God through hate. Some may dislike the way the story turns from the personal into a more universal theme, but I thought it was genius.

Highly recommended.

This story has been described as a "love triangle" between the narrator Bendrix, Sarah, and her husband Henry, but it is really more a story of three people revolving like planets around a fourth, unseen, yet pivotal character--God, whose existence remains to the end neither affirmed nor rejected.

Graham Greene belongs to what I would call the school of nomads and heartbroken cynics. He travelled the world, he viewed it with an intelligent yet humane mixture of compassion and disgust, and he struggled to the end to give man some hope while at the same time viewing man's condition with utterly unsentimental realism. It was a difficult balancing act. Greene was too intelligent to accept the cardboard God of the sentimental and the superstitious, but he realized too that without a belief in some transcendent order in the universe man was liable to destroy himself within the dark tentacles of war, greed, obsession, betrayal, and despair. At the same time, he was acutely aware that this belief in a higher power could itself lead down the very same hole. It is precisely Sarah's belated discovery of faith that ruins any chance of her attaining happiness.

Greene's genius in this novel is to set this grand metaphysical drama of man and faith as a background against the foreground of a passionate, mature romance. These two tragic themes, the impossibility of love and the impossibility of faith, combined with man's absolute inability to live without either, resonate with one another to create an almost unbearably moving work of art. I can't remember the last time I wept reading a novel, but there were moments reading The End of the Affair when a turn of phrase made my throat clench and the tears well in my eyes.

This is a work of power, feeling, intelligence, and nuance. It deserves to be considered one of the great novels of the century. Do not hesitate to read it.

The doomed love story of Bendrix and Sarah in "The End of the Affair" forced me to reflect on the power of faith and God himself, a creature I'm none too eager to embrace. Because it did this, I found myself very wrapped up in this book, moreso than I even wanted to be, for I was just browsing through the bookstore when I picked it up. I read the first eight chapters while I was still sitting in the store.

At the point where I was still reading it after my fourth cup of Earl Grey, I realized that Graham Greene is a genius, and the book is incredibly smart. It's a fictionalized account of an affair between an author and his married neighbor during the air raids in WWII London that ended suddenly one day without explanation. Though their love was passionate and real, though Bendrix and Sarah were mad for each other, she ends the affair and all contact with him the day one of the shells goes off near the house they're occupying, momentarily knocking Bendrix unconscious. Something happened to Sarah while Bendrix was unconscious, something intangible, spiritual and rooted in her love, that scared her to death and forced her to break things off. But Bendrix, knowing Sarah is not one for cruelty, won't explain what happened and won't really even see him.

Months afterward, Bendrix is still obsessed and hires a private investigator to find out what's become of Sarah and figure out why she dumped him so abruptly to return to the life with her husband that she didn't want or enjoy.

All of this makes for, of course, fascinating mystery. It also leads in an unexpected direction regarding spirituality, the existence of God, the need for suffering and the occasional torture that rational thinkers face when dealing with the unexplainable. Bendrix, being a skeptic regarding God, can't quite deal with exactly what happened to Sarah, which he eventually discovers but cannot completely accept.

This book affected the way I think. Brilliant novel.

Thank God for the Contemporary Lit professor who made us read "The End of the Affair." Since that first, blissful reading, I've reread this novel at least six times, and I always end up giving away my copy to a fellow reader. The story seems so simple: Bendridx, a self-absorbed bachelor writer, has an affair with Sarah, the wife of Bendrix's friend, Henry. The relationship sparks love inside of Bendrix, and reawakens passions in Sarah, until a bomb falls, leading Sarah to make a deal with God: if God lets Bendrix live, she'll give him up forever. After Bendrix's miraculous recovery, Sarah keeps her promise, even as she tries to disbelieve in God: if, after all, there is no God, then her deal doesn't count. The harder she seeks atheism, the stronger her faith becomes, even to the point where miracles appear to happen in her presence. The characters in this novel--and the myriad relationships between them--are seamlessly drawn. Also, Greene handles the combination of past and present tenses, plus excerpts from Sarah's diary, with a master's touch and clarity. Best of all, you can take "The End of the Affair" on any level you want, from a simple wartime romance to a complex spiritual fable, and it succeeds regardless. One of Greene's contemporaries is quoted on the jacket, calling "The End of the Affair," one of the best novels of our time "In this or any language." That author's name is William Faulkner. Heady praise for one of the Twentieth Century's best novels.

Greene's "The End of the Affair" is nothing short of a masterpiece. After I picked it up I could not put it down, and I have read it several times since.Greene's depiction of the emotion of love found and lost is heart wrenching. You feel his words, and empathize with his pain. This book was written from Greene's own experience, and can be seen as autobiographical to his own depictions of love. This book is a must read for understanding the true raw emotion of love, and the emotions that stem from it's loss. You won't read a page without prolific questioning of the topics of: jealousy, hate, love, and God. It's meaning has added to all conversations about love with it's asking: "Can hate only stem for those who we once loved",and "Can jealousy only exist with desire?"

Greene was inspired by Ford Madox Ford's masterpiece of 1915, The Good Soldier, when he wrote The End of the Affair in 1951. Ford called his 'the saddest story', and indeed, Greene's work is nearly as sad.

The love-story between Bendrix and Sarah is told in weaving, unchronological prose, moving from past to future, rarely staying in the present. As Bendrix loses Sarah, in the end, not to husband Henry, but to God, Bendrix's bitterness is firmly compounded, and the sadness of this story is not just the death of a lover, but the death of Bendrix's hope. There are hints at the end of the novel that Bendrix, who finally acknowledges God in his very hatred of Him, will come to share the faith that made Sarah's last days of life make some sense. But this is questionable.

I strongly recommend this book to readers who likes Greene's detective fiction and his entertainments, but who crave a thinner book with a thicker theme. It should be noted that the novel should be taken more seriously than the recent film made of the book, directed by Neil Jordan. While Jordan's film was beautiful to watch, and the acting superb, the story was altered almost unrecognisably towards the end, and the assumption on the part of Jordan that the book was really about Greene and his mistress (Catherine Walston), coloured the film and destroyed much of its authenticity.

Like all of Greene's works, this novel is largely problematic in theological terms, but as Greene works with paradoxes and rarely in terms of black and white, this is what we have come to expect, and love.

I first read "The End of the Affair" in college, strictly because I had to write a thesis on one of Greene's books and this one was the shortest. In the process of writing the paper I reread it four times and since have read it three. In today's sort of "cynical for the sake of being cynical" world, this book shows the true spirit of romance. Not romance in a loving way. Romance in the grittiest, heartbreaking sense of the word. Is it true that the thing we want most is the thing that we can't have ? To what extent will we go to love ? To prove to ourselves that we love ? who will we hurt ? who will we fight ? Greene tackles all of these questions. He doesn't preach or claim to have all the answers, he just tells a story. Anyone who's read other works by Greene knows what a gift he had for imagery and poingiancy. This novel epitomizes those things and in the midst of deciding who's right and who's wrong, who's innocent and who's guilty, he'll break your heart and make you think about all the reasons why. For anyone who has ever loved and lost, for anyone who has a heart or a sense of forbidden romance.....this is the book for you.

One great benefit of the recent release of Neil Jordan's version of "End" is that it prodded me into re-reading the book, sending me off into a bit of a Graham Greene kick. Jordan's movie version makes some rather key changes (not for the better), while sticking eerily close at other times. The bottom line is the familiar one: the book is much better than the movie, especially in delivering the message Greene intended to convey. Faulkner described "End" once as the best novel in any language he'd ever read. (No doubt providing the impetus for innumerable doctoral theses in the meantime.) While I think "The Power & the Glory" is better, this is still a wonderful work, wrestling with the themes of love, faith, and religion as one.