A Sort of Life Book

3.5 stars

This is Graham Greene's first memoir, the second being "Ways of Escape" (Vintage 2002), in which I enjoyed reading 40 years ago. I still like its paperback copy with brownish paper and hope to reread it as a tribute due to my respect after reading his excerpt from "The Power and the Glory" (chosen by TIME magazine in 2005 as one of the hundred best English novels since 1923: ) assigned to study in one of our literature courses in 1969; mysteriously, I recall I had never heard/known his fame as a great novelist, no one introduced him to me, therefore, I had to find out myself who he was and possibly why we should read him or be familiar with one of his novels.

Unfortunately, I certainly need a new copy to reread because the mentioned copy seemingly delicious to a few white ants was systematically devoured from the cover down to page 48 like a round shallow 2-inch wide well-like hole, I didn’t know when they did their ugly operation like that. However, I still keep it and in the meantime try to write something on some interesting sentences I underlined, for instance:

… I always enjoyed his teaching, … , he opened my eyes to the importance of precision in my own language as well. (p. 79)

The experience of a long life may possibly increase one’s intuition of human character, … (p. 121)

Never again, I swore, would I read a novel of Conrad’s – a vow I kept for more than a quarter of a century, until I found myself with Heart of Darkness in a small paddle boat travelling up a Congo tributary in 1959 from one leper colony to another. (p. 172)

I also found these quote-like, a kind of tip-of-thought sentences worth pondering:

The influence of early books is profound. (p. 37)

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered. (p. 107)

I was only saved by failure. ( p. 165)

And some of his interesting anecdotes:

In my dream I found a book for which I had long been searching on a particular shelf, and so in the morning, before I had breakfast, I walked down the street to see whether my dream might prove true. I was disappointed, the book was not there, ... I inquired after the manager whom I remembered well: he had died the year before, and I suppose the new manager had changed whatever was the source of the smell which had so long haunted my imagination. ( pp. 57-58)

Boredom seemed to swell like a balloon inside the head; it became a pressure inside the skull: sometimes I feared the balloon would burst and I would lose my reason. Then, if it were not term-time, I would beg my brother Raymond to take a train with me to London, an hour away ... We would have lunch in a restaurant in Soho ... and walk down Charing Cross Road looking at the second-hand books. I was soothed by the movements of the crowd and the hard resistance of the pavement under my feet. ... (p. 94)

Time since I left Oxford had moved slowly as the unemployed bands of those days, shifting, with hands spread out, along a pavement edge: the British-American Tobacco Company, the tutoring in the Pennies, the long evening hours on the Journal with little to do, the five hundred words a day on a novel which I was half aware belonged to the past and would never be published. ... (p. 139)

And some words probably newly-coined, uniquely-expressed we might have never read anywhere before:

I was still so heartfree that I could wonder, with cynical amusement, how long it would be before her emotions began to be transferred towards our bizarre and spotty analyst. (p. 81)

The doctor opened the door himself, a young Hindu, and showed me into a dingy consulting room where he must have been waiting with eastern patience for the sick to seek him out. (p. 150)

'There was a band of pea-pickers at he station, a rough-looking man with a wooden leg, his wife (a worn, curiously refined woman) and his three children, two girls of about six and four, and a boy who could not have been more than two. ( p. 169)

Enjoy!