|
List Price: $14.00Amazon.com's Price: $11.90 You Save: $2.10 (15%)Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Buy Now!
This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping.
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780140291094
ISBN: 0140291091
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 192
Publication Date: November 01, 1999
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Sales Rank: 394526
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Related Items:
Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
Set in London during and just after World War II, Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is a pathos-laden examination of a three-way collision between love of self, love of another, and love of God. The affair in question involves Maurice Bendrix, a solipsistic novelist, and a dutifully married woman, Sarah Miles. The lovers meet at a party thrown by Sarah's dreary civil-servant husband, and proceed to liberate each other from boredom and routine unhappiness. Reflecting on the ebullient beginnings of their romance, Bendrix recalls: "There was never any question in those days of who wanted whom--we were together in desire." Indeed, the affair goes on unchecked for several years until, during an afternoon tryst, Bendrix goes downstairs to look for intruders in his basement and a bomb falls on the building. Sarah rushes down to find him lying under a fallen door, and immediately makes a deal with God, whom she has never particularly cared for. "I love him and I'll do anything if you'll make him alive.... I'll give him up forever, only let him be alive with a chance.... People can love each other without seeing each other, can't they, they love You all their lives without seeing You."
Bendrix, as evidenced by his ability to tell the story, is not dead, merely unconscious, and so Sarah must keep her promise. She breaks off the relationship without giving a reason, leaving Bendrix mystified and angry. The only explanation he can think of is that she's left him for another man. It isn't until years later, when he hires a private detective to ascertain the truth, that he learns of her impassioned vow. Sarah herself comes to understand her move through a strange rationalization. Writing to God in her journal, she says: You willed our separation, but he [Bendrix] 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. It's as though the pull toward faith were inevitable, if incomprehensible--perhaps as punishment for her sin of adultery. In her final years, Sarah's faith only deepens, even as she remains haunted by the bombing and the power of her own attraction to God. Set against the backdrop of a war-ravaged city, The End of the Affair is equally haunting as it lays forth the question of what constitutes love in troubling, unequivocal terms. --Melanie Rehak
Book Description:
The novelist Maurice Bendrix's love affair with his friend's wife, Sarah, had begun in London during the Blitz. One day, inexplicably and without warning, Sarah had broken off the relationship.
It seemed impossible that there could be a rival for her heart. Yet two years later, driven by obsessive jealousy and grief, Bendrix sends Pakris, a private detective, to follow Sarah and find out the truth.
"One of the most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody's language."-- William Faulkner
"Singularly moving and beautiful."-- Evelyn Waugh
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
To start with, I am a Greene fanatic, so you might take my opinion with a grain of salt. I didn't read The End of the Affair for many years after I'd read virtually all of Greene's other novels. I love his thrillers, his adventures, his "serious" works. But I didn't think I'd love a book about an adulterous affair, particularly one with God and Catholicism at its center. I finally got around to it. How wrong, wrong, wrong I was.
Having read it twice, I now have to ask whether it's Greene's ... Read More
Rating:  -
I hadn't seen the movie when I read this book, so I had no real expectations for it, other than the fact that it is a so-called "classic".
It was a quick read, possibly because I found myself skimming over the repetitive bits, and there were pages of them. The final two pages of Sarah's journal are repeated twice word-for-word a few pages later. I'm surprised to see such a successful short story writer being so uneconomical with words. After Sarah died, there were still 100 pages of the book ... Read More
Rating: -
I have to disagree with the previous poster who says this is more spiritual than anything else. Though it is couched in religious terms, I see this as a cautionary tale about the danger of falling into despair, which is relevant to all humans in addition to being the unforgivable sin. I am an avowed agnostic, and this remains my favorite book after several years. I have never read a better book about the experience of loneliness, jealousy, hatred, despair and selfish love.
Rating: -
This melding of lust, love, and theology joins the short list of the best novels I have ever read (a list heavily populated by Graham Greene). If you haven't yet read this title, I discourage you from over-reading reviews on it which might give away the story and ruin it for you. There are plenty of twists and surprises. Plenty of memorable quotes and bittersweet moments.
This is a tale set in the WWII London suburbs and narrates a tangled adulterous situation involving: a bachelor author, ... Read More
Rating:  -
I find Mr. Graham Greene to have illuminated the topic of love by having God step into the stage of the drama, in a role as invisible and real as are the tortures of jealousy and desire. Marks of wisdom and theological intimacy abound in this fiction as it allows a battle of wits to take place between the author Maurice Bendrix and the mysterum tremendum of divine intervention, providence and faith. Ultimately there are many a question that shroud this work and sanctimoniously dedicate an altar to the sacred ... Read More
Television Show
Collectibles
Movie Searches
|
|
|
Search for posters,
art prints, photos, collectables, merchandise, toys, t-shirts
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Join the Nielsen//NetRatings Research Panel and you could win a new car, a dream vacation, a dream home makeover or $50,000 Cash!
TV Guide
Program listings, celebrity profiles, industry
gossip, movie reviews, puzzle.
More
Entertainment
& TV Magazines
This site is
Hosted
by Bluehost
Read
my Bluehost Review
Original Superhero & other designs for t-shirts, bumper
stickers, prints, mugs, and other cool merchandise. |
|
