[показать]Another wonderful novel that definitely joins the ranks of my favorite books and that I couldn't pull myself away from (which seems to have become a dangerous for may studies trend). Written by Graham Green, "The End of the Affair" is a story of a relationship between a married woman Sarah Miles and her lover Maurice Bendrix. The book is written in a form of Bendrix's diary, in which he accounts for his past affair with Sarah, as well as for the events that take place in the present, when the woman returns into his life. Tormented by the whole array of emotions towards his former lover, the protagonist claims that "this is a record of hate far more than of love," but from the very beginning grapples with his feelings trying to find the truth behind his own jealousy and Sarah's changed behavior.

The events that take place in the story are presented out of their chronological order -- in the beginning, the reader is given only an occasional glimpse of Bendrix's passionate relationship with Sarah of two years ago; while it is easy to reconstruct the whole story from these occasional bits, one can't help but be somewhat biased by the narrator, who offers a very one-sided account of the events. It is not until the middle of the book that the reader joins Bendrix in discovering a different side of the affair, with the help of Sarah's own diary. From that point on, one becomes an observer of emotional fever of two lovers, whose torments are exacerbated by sudden quest of God and faith by formerly atheistic Sarah. By the end of the book this quest, which I, of course, have found very interesting, becomes the leading theme of the story and to some extent affects each major character.

It was the first book by G. Green that I have ever read, but it, most certainly, won't be the last one (coincidentally, I have included three more of his books to my 2010 list). I absolutely loved the author's simple and unpretentious style, his ability to seemingly withdraw from the story and let the characters take the center stage. As a result, when turning pages of "The End of the Affair", I almost believed that I was reading a melancholic account of a beautiful story of passionate love between a man and a woman, narrated and experienced by a real person. There is a movie by the same title with Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes, both of whom I like and for which Julianne Moore was nominated for Oscar, so I might give it a try some time, even though I rarely enjoy films that are based on meaningful works of literature -- there are so many things, without which the story loses its charm, that cannot be expressed on a silver screen.

Осталось прочитать 26 книг списка на 2010 год