Word: grahame
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Unwritten Novel. There are the makings of half a dozen novels in Graham Greene's own life story. The first of them, chronologically, would be the story of a boy's growing up, a novel Greene has never written...
There his creator, Graham Greene, leaves him. The end of that affair, he implies, can only be the beginning of another. And this affair will have no end. Better to hate God, much better, says Greene, than not to know Him at all. For you can hate God only when you are in pain-and if you can stand the pain without drugs, it may turn into love...
...Affair, like all Graham Greene's novels, is loaded with buried questions, like mines. And the terms of his story are so studiedly, elaborately mundane that at first the unwary reader is hardly aware of the muffled explosions of the answers. (One of his buried questions : Must a woman who becomes a saint necessarily think of herself as "a bitch and a fake?" Greene's answer...
...finest book), but most of them boggled over those last 50 pages. "Difficult to swallow," said London's Sunday Times. "Too openly schematic," said the critic of The Listener. Said the critic of the New Statesman and Nation: "This, it might seem, is the last book by Graham Greene which a nonspecialist [in religion] will be able to review...
Whether that jab is justified or not, this is a new departure for Graham-Greene -the first novel he has written in the first person. That fact signals a special effort, an attempt to go further than he has ever gone before. The first-person narrative is a tricky medium-especially when the person who tells the story is the somewhat seedy, not altogether admirable, Graham Greene type of "hero." And, as if that difficulty were not enough, Greene has added a second narrator: the book is divided between Bendrix' reminiscent story and Sarah's diary. Only...