Reviews for A Sort of Life

The average rating for A Sort of Life based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-03-12 00:00:00 Beverly Hartman I am still to find anything from Graham Greene even remotely, even marginally disappointing. I pray to God that never happens and I am also secretly assured of my belief in that truism. "A Sort Of Life" gets overlooked, in the light of the much more comprehensive and illustrious "Ways Of Escape" which details, with equal candour, wit and deep insight, all of his travels, experiences and inspirations throughout his long and literally tireless life as a writer and chronicler of twentieth century's most devastating moral spiritual and geo-political conundrums. And I have read most reviews here on Goodreads complaining that while this slim, concise memoir is as elegantly written and compulsively readable as anything by Greene, it ends suddenly with him having enjoyed a brief initial success with the publication of his first properly finished novel and then facing the prospect of inevitable failure in the years after that. What they all must have failed to notice was that Greene himself had added the disclaimer that this is not a complete auto-biography and is concerned primarily with his childhood, boyhood, adolescence, youth and bare beginnings as possibly the greatest English-language novelist of the twentieth century, in my opinion at least. And what a sort of life it turns out to be indeed. Beginning from the mesmerising and mellow descriptions of his childhood and his large, illustrious family, known to all as the ubiquitous Greenes, from his earliest experiences and sensations, the vivid childhood dreams and haunting nightmares, the small joys and fears right down to the boyish exhilaration of the first ever books he read and the games he played, they all form an enjoyable, effortlessly charming first act of this condensed, lucid book. Greene takes us on a whirlwind, dizzying tour of faces, memories, incidents, experiences and impressions recorded indelibly in his mind and any one who has already immersed herself or himself in even a substantial part of the writer's work would soon recognize the unmistakable influence of all these incidents and experiences in his fiction. But this being a work of Greene, it is only a matter of time before we step into darker, grimmer realities and this begins as he chronicles his painful boyhood in school, tormented by bullies in the dark of the dormitory and the first ever stirrings of suicidal despair lurking in his soul. One almost feels the sky darken with pitch-black clouds as Greene confides perversely how, in the dark of the night, he would contemplate cutting open his knee and one feels equally thrilled and piqued with intrigue as he sets out on his truant escapes from the stifling boredom and the oppressive company of other boys to read his favourite books in the cover of the foliage in the countryside, only to be discovered and then destined to "heal" himself with psycho-analysis. And so, we continue to follow him to the more easily recognizable and more-talked-about episodes of his eventful but never peaceful life. There is the first stirring of an unabashed yearning full of love and sexual desire for a woman; there is the subsequent despair leading to his first ever tryst with the danger of death, those attempts at Russian Roulette that he has chronicled more than once in both his memoirs and his fiction, leaving behind a permanent inclination of being on the dangerous edge of things. There is his inescapable habit of aimless wandering and drifting, the mundane monotony of his initial attempts to find work, his isolated exile in Nottingham which would also influence him when writing one of his later novels and finally, through it all, his own relentless struggle to write a proper novel that would find some day the fortune of being published... The final chapters of the book take us to even more intriguing episodes of his life - his initially reluctant conversion to Catholicism which grew out of his earnest desire to understand the faith of his about-to-be wife Vivien and his own present-day thoughts and doubts about the same, his apprenticeship in the Times, forsaking which he still regretted and finally, the failure to which his early books were condemned and the constant sense of uncertainty that lingered over his livelihood. And through it all, not for once does the standard of skilled writing and nuanced, perceptive storytelling ever dip. Greene frequently does not get enough credit for writing the equally impressive travelogues, short stories, essays, film reviews and even memoirs apart from his novels but "A Sort Of Life" reminds us of all the reasons why he was such a consummate writer and such a gifted raconteur of an almost inexhaustible supply of stories that were built from his own exciting (to an outsider) and eventful life. The prose is lucid and yet honest and unambiguous; the descriptions of experiences, sensations, sights, smells and sounds are vivid and evocative; the rich themes of aging, distortion of memory, nostalgia and retrospection on past failure, love, friendship and family are infused organically to thicken the autobiography into something even more substantial and true to the expectations, that we have now habitually had from him, it makes for a most delightful, genuinely compassionate and tenderly moving piece of work.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-10-13 00:00:00 William Woolley 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!