This is an intimate portrait of a woman in love. Everything she does, everything she sees, everyone she talks with is related back to HIM. She reads tThis is an intimate portrait of a woman in love. Everything she does, everything she sees, everyone she talks with is related back to HIM. She reads things he might be interested in. If she hears someone talk of a vacation she thinks ‘I’ll ask him if he’s been there.� She dresses ‘just in case,� and she looks at fashions in store windows daily. A phone call brings dejection if it’s NOT HIM. Everything else is simply filling time before their next meeting.
Of course, he’s married with kids. He’s from Eastern Europe (she never tells us where), assigned to France for his job, and has brought his family with him. She lives for his calls and his hurried visits. When they are together she dreads seeing him sneak a glance at his watch and then suffers dejection as she watches him dress to leave.
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The quick calls are all-important and infrequent. He can’t call from home and these are the pre-cellphone days of pay-phones on street corners. (It’s 1991.) She makes promises, in effect, ‘if he calls today I’ll make a donation to…� She drops money into beggars� cups with a wish.
The book is a primer on what it is like for a woman to be in love with a married man. She never tells us if he’s in love with her. (view spoiler)[ She doesn’t have to tell us. Sure he likes her, but we know he’s in it for the sex. (hide spoiler)]
The book is also a bit of a meta-novel. She tells us she is writing the book as therapy to get over him. There's an extended analogy between her obsession with writing a book and trying to make it perfect with the way she tried to make her relationship perfect. Some passages about this:
[On why she is writing.] “I do not wish to explain my passion - that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify - I just want to describe it.�
“Living in passion or writing: in each case one's perception of time is fundamentally different.�
“I stare at the written pages with astonishment and something resembling shame, feelings I certainly never felt when I was living out my passion and writing about it.�
She raises an interesting question. Once you are past a reality that happened to you, and then you have written about it, what’s the difference between having experienced something and just having read about it in the first place?
Her lover’s native language is not French so his French is imperfect. “…I was able to appreciate the approximate quality of our conversations. From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.�
Her lover is called back to his home country. She waits for a phone call that will never come. Or will it? (view spoiler)[ Months later, after absolutely no contact, he’s in town and he calls: “It’s me.� We know he just wants a quickie. Will she see him? (hide spoiler)]
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I liked the writing. The sentences flow; not necessarily short, but simple, sparse and to the point, nothing lyrical. It’s a very intimate portrait of a woman baring her soul in a way that I think few authors, men or women, would have the courage to do. There’s a bit of explicit sex.
This is the first book I've read by the 2022 Nobel Prize winner. Almost all of her work is autobiographical. Her books in order, catalog her parents� lives, her teenage years, her marriage, her affair with an East European man (this book I am reviewing), her abortion, the onset of Alzheimer's, her mother's death, her battle with breast cancer.
A love story set in a time of war. In her introduction to this short novel of historical fiction (150 pages) the author implies this is a true story. A love story set in a time of war. In her introduction to this short novel of historical fiction (150 pages) the author implies this is a true story. I say ‘implies� because she tells us this story was told to her by a good friend who was a friend of one of the principals. True or not true, it has a shocking ending, more so than the ending of a lot of thrillers that claim to be shocking. The author also tells us what the book is about: the moral disorder brought about by war.
I call it a love story, but only the woman is in love, so it’s a story of unrequited love. The object of her affection is a handsome young commander, billeted in her house with her soldier-brother. The two men have a bromance going � they have been best friends since childhood. The commander is busy fighting his war and tells us (and her) he is only interested in “women of the lowest sort.�
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The core of the story becomes his treatment of this beautiful 18-year old woman who is in love with him and her reaction to this unrequited love. He can be kind or cruel, attentive or dismissive, loving or nasty, considerate or callous. (view spoiler)[... (hide spoiler)] Oftentimes he wounds her unknowingly or unthinkingly; other times he’s just cruel. She offers herself to him and he rejects her. An example of how he is unknowingly cruel: she is sick for a time and he tends to her in bed, even dressing her. (Other members of the household assume they are lovers � they are not.) He sees her beautiful naked body and still doesn’t want her. How can the young woman in love react to that except by being devastated? (view spoiler)[... (hide spoiler)]
“…all our contrasting feelings bound us together like two lovers, or partners in a dance. That much-desired bond did actually exist between us, and for my Sophie the worst torture of all must have been to feel how suffocatingly close it was, and at the same time how slight.�
The object of her love initially commands a rag-tag group of soldiers fighting the Russian Bolsheviks in the ethnically complex area around Lithuania, Belarus, Poland and then-Prussia. The time frame is just after WW I and around the time of the Russian Revolution. (view spoiler)[ He’s promoted to commander of a larger brigade. Eventually he becomes a soldier of fortune in locations around the world. (hide spoiler)]
In a way it’s a war story too but there’s not a lot of gore nor detailed discussion of battles. We know very early into the book that it’s a tragedy. (view spoiler)[ We know about ten pages in that his bff is dead and we learn 10 or 15 pages later that the woman has died as well. (hide spoiler)] There’s a lot more to the story that I won’t go into because I’ll risk giving away too much of such a short novel.
I enjoyed the story and the writing, although the writing had a somewhat stiff flavor, almost as if written in the late 1800s. Perhaps the author, a historical novelist, wrote it that way (in 1939) in keeping with the time period of the story. Plus it’s translated, so I don’t really know.
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The Belgian-French author (1903-1987) wrote collections of essays, poems, historical novels and her personal memoirs. She’s best known for Memoirs of Hadrian. (It must be good � a 4.3 rating on GR with 22,000 ratings and almost 2,000 reviews! It’s often called a ‘modern classic.�) Late in life she moved with her female partner to live on Mount Desert Island, Maine, where her home, Petite Plaisance, is now a museum dedicated to her memory.
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Prussian soldiers in WWI from colorostariu.files.wordpress.com The author from lesbianhistorytrailmdi.weebly.com The author's home in Maine from frenchheritagesociety.org
I’ll start with the basics from the GR blurb so that I don’t give away much more plot.
"This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes MauricI’ll start with the basics from the GR blurb so that I don’t give away much more plot.
"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.
Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exorcise the persistence of his passion by retracing its course from obsessive love to love-hate. At first, he believes he hates Sarah and her husband, Henry. Yet as he delves deeper into his emotional outlook, Bendrix's hatred shifts to the God he feels has broken his life, but whose existence he at last comes to recognize.�
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The story is told in kind of (I’ll make up a phrase here) multiple retrospectives. We know at the start of the book that Sarah has died, but she ended the affair two years before for, let’s say religious reasons. So, as he narrates the story to the reader, Bendrix is at times going back to her death, or back to their affair and the start of it, six years ago, or back to when she broke off the affair, two years ago.
The End of the Affair is one of Greene’s four ‘Catholic novels.� The others are Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter. I’ve read all four and I would say this is his ‘most Catholic novel,� although Graham didn’t like to be referred to as a Catholic novelist. (Although he met with the Pope who told him, basically, keep doing what you’re doing.)
Catholic or not, this is certainly a novel about God, specifically, belief in God. I had to add a God shelf to my reviews. Bendrix, an atheist, is so much in love with Sarah, and so traumatized by her ending the affair, and then by her death, that he hates God for bringing these tragedies about. But wait! How can you hate a God you don’t believe in?
He can’t admit that he might be wrong, so he deliberately tries to stop hating God. And yet he feels Sarah is somehow still ‘there.� He feels he can’t get involved with other women because she would know he is being unfaithful to her. But wait! If Sarah is still around, ‘up there somewhere…� what does that mean about a God?
And then we have some mysterious happenings. Miracles? No, Bendrix says, coincidences. Catholic issues also rise to the surface when Bendrix argues with her husband over the funeral. Priest or no priest? Burial or cremation?
Their affair started in 1939, so the war and the London blitz play an important role in the story. Bendrix is a writer. He’s successful enough that he can just about live on his earnings. There’s enough about writing and how all this trauma impacts his writing that I added this book to my ‘writing� shelf too.
After Sarah’s death Bendrix loses interest in writing. “� when Sarah left me, I recognized my work for what it was - as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes or cheap jewelry?�
Henry, Sarah’s husband is characterized as a boring civil servant. He has no friends and turns to Bendrix in desperation, naively telling him, in effect, ‘I think my wife is having an affair.� A private detective is hired, adding complexities to the plot.
Bendrix is so in love that he suffers made-up jealousies and so fears eventually falling out of love, that it partially destroys his love. “We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.�
Sarah suffers her own convolutions of logic. She comes to believe that you can still be in love with someone even though you choose not to see or interact with them. Why can’t Bendrix feel the same way? “People go on loving God, don’t they, all their lives without seeing Him?�
There’s a lot of good writing. I liked this summary “St. Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn't exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist.�
And here’s a good metaphor about conversation with a dull priest invited to dinner: “He had very limited small talk, and his answers fell like trees across the road.�
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Greene is a great writer � good writing, excellent storytelling and always serious philosophical issues. I just read and reviewed The Quiet American about the Vietnam War, and I decided that was so well done that I would re-read this book that I read many years ago. Greene or his books frequently appears on various lists of “The One Hundred Best…�
Top photo of London in WW II from reddeerplayers.com The author from slate.com
A novella, really a short story. A man hires a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea. He “can’t love� but wants to lean how. Although he hiA novella, really a short story. A man hires a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea. He “can’t love� but wants to lean how. Although he hires her, she tells him she’s not a prostitute. Death in this story refers to his inability to love.
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Here’s a passage that gives you a good idea of the writing style that uses extremely short sentences almost exclusively :
“The tears wake her. She looks at you. She looks at the room. And again at you. She strokes your hand. Asks: Why are you crying? You say it’s for her to say, she’s the one who ought to know. She answers softly, gently: Because you don’t love. You say that’s it. She asks you to say it clearly. You say: I don’t love. She says: Never? You say: Never. She says: The wish to be about to kill a lover, to keep him for yourself, yourself alone, to take him, steal him in defiance of every law, every moral authority � you don’t know what that is, you’ve never experienced it? You say: Never. She looks at you, repeats: A dead man’s a strange thing.�
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Here’s the blurb from GR and on the book jacket:
The woman is no one in particular, a "she," a warm, moist body with a beating heart-the enigma of Other. Skilled in the mechanics of sex, he desires through her to penetrate a different mystery: he wants to learn love. It isn't a matter of will, she tells him. Still, he wants to learn to try . . .This beautifully wrought erotic novel is an extended haiku on the meaning of love, "perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe," and of its absence, "the malady of death." "The whole tragedy of the inability to love is in this work, thanks to Duras' unparalleled art of reinventing the most familiar words, of weighing their meaning." - Le Monde; "Deceptively simple and Racinian in its purity, condensed to the essential." - Translation Review.
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At the end the author gives a few pages of instructions about staging this story for the theatre or making a film of it. Written in 1982, it was staged as a play in 2018. Wikipedia tells us that during the time when Duras wrote this story, she was drinking 6 to 7 liters of wine a day and was in and out of the hospital, sometimes so incapacitated that she could not write. She dictated this story to her nurse.
The story did not appeal to me. Perhaps if I was into poetry and treated is as a haiku it would be more appealing. So unless you are into poetry, I don’t really recommend it.
Top photo of a French beach in Basque country from nyt.com Middle photo from meredithcorp.io The author from groveatlantic.com ...more
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