The opening paragraphs of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair likely resonate with anyone who has tried to tell or write a story. What’s the place where one starts, how much context does one give, how far does one look back? With Greene we get these haunting, memorable opening words: “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one…
Category: Feuilleton
Standing out from his bibliography of 26 novels, The Power and the Glory is arguably Graham Greene’s masterpiece. I reviewed this 1940 novel here. In short, we’re presented with the story of a nameless and hunted priest, trying to evade his captors during early twentieth century anti-clerical purges in the Mexican state of Tabasco. (Greene wrote a journalistic account of…
In this scene from Margaret Laurence’s novel The Stone Angel, the elderly Hagar Shipley has escaped from her son Marvin’s house, in order to avoid being placed in a nursing home. She finds refuge in an abandoned building in the forest, along the coast. She has nothing but rainwater to drink until a stranger appears — Murray Ferney Lees. Hagar…
This is an audio recorded reading from Chapter 1 of the 1930 novel Vile Bodies. In this scene, passengers are travelling on a ship across the English Channel from France to Dover, England. At the heart of the humorous scene is a sly Jesuit, Father Rothschild, and the entrepreneurial evangelist Mrs. Melrose Ape, along with her troupe of young women…
This is an audio recording of a scene from Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood. Hazel Motes, a tormented and blinded preacher of the fledgling “Church Without Christ” is persistently haunted by that “ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind” — a figure he tries to escape, yet can’t. In this scene Hazel Motes…
This is an excerpt from Graham Greene’s 1938 novel Brighton Rock read by me, as part of a new series of audio recordings entitled Feuilleton, sampling works of twentieth century literature. In this scene, the young and naive Rose is grappling with the recent suicide of her sociopath husband — who almost took her down with him along his dark, destructive…