sour people engage in unscrupulous activities and find god
while contemplating the sheer desert of time
Fiction, 1951.
When Express reviewed The End of the Affair, they said that it “captures perfectly the atmosphere of rainy wartime London - try to read this in one sitting if you can”. I did not read it in one sitting, although its length (192 pages) is conducive to such an activity. Instead, I read it in the mountains. It was cold, I was mostly wallowing, and no one was really there, an appropriate experience for a novel that is just that: icy in a way where no connection formed reached satisfying fruition, intensely glum, and an ode to alienation.
There are three main characters; Henry and Sarah are married, and Maurice is an author who finds himself falling in love with Sarah. In it, the people grow tired, have sex, and contemplate the vastness of their life and of the world in a manner that barely impacts their actual functioning. In this process, they somehow find God. They are to their core, sour people who wonder how they might ever segment free-flowing time into meaningless chunks that can be viewed as sacred boundaries, even if only to get through a day.
If you aren’t already invested, perhaps some scandalous details will convince you. The affair in the novel is based on Greene’s own affair with a woman named Catherine, whose husband was also adulterous and fathered six children with his secretary, Betty. Oh, Greene is Catherine’s godfather too. Insanity! Greene doesn’t try and hide this fact, the novel is even dedicated to “C.”
Film: In the Mood for Love (It is entirely a coincidence that the new reissue of the novel has a cover that could literally be a still from the film. Though that is not my reason for picking it as a pair to the book, it is still amusing and brings me joy.)
Song: Beach Baby - Bon Iver
Bookshop: Midland offers it, online and in-store. Bonus tip, if you go to the shop and politely ask the man at the counter for a discount, he almost always gives you one, regardless of the content or quantity of what you buy.
Did you find god, when is it our turn to find god!
The cover is eerily similar to the film woah.