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A review by paul_cornelius
A Sort of Life by Graham Greene
5.0
Remarkably revealing. I haven't enjoyed an autobiography this much in quite some time. Graham Greene provides a frank history of his early years up to the time of his first successful novel, The Man Within, and the immediate aftermath of failure and then the legal problems arising out of Stamboul Train. The book itself is filled with passages expressing wit, irony, melancholy, excitement, and failure, all reflective of the somewhat troubled and manic-depressive life of Greene.
There is something of a unique style to this work. Greene avoids a strictly linear description of his life. Instead, he offers passages and sections that are entirely associative in his memory. Thus the reader not only discovers about the books that interested him as a child and young man but incidents he later saw as populating his fiction--although he claims to have been unaware of it at the time of his writing.
Too, there are especially interesting notes towards the end. Greene learned much from his initial lack of success. And he describes what amounts to a guideline for writing that rejected the imitative failures he produced for Doubleday and Hienemann following the surprise success of The Man Within.
There is much atmosphere and mood to his description of working at The Times as a sub editor. And it is equally appealing to see his descriptions of working with his editors at Heinemann and Doubleday. This was the heyday of the novel, a literary age that is all but unrecognizable to the contemporary world. The Western world itself, of course, was much more literary. Newspapers provided for the immediacy of news, while novels and magazines devoted to short stories outpaced even the motion pictures as a venue for entertainment and enlightenment. And Greene was there in its midst, almost failing. So near was he to doing so that he came close to accepting a teaching appointment at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. The book ends on his meeting with his friend, the department chair at the university, who offered him the job. It is some twenty years later, and Greene remarks upon the man's once promising career as a poet, which he allowed to slip away because of initial failures, leading to his exile in Siam. Only by the surprise success of Stamboul Train did Greene himself escape the same fate.
There is something of a unique style to this work. Greene avoids a strictly linear description of his life. Instead, he offers passages and sections that are entirely associative in his memory. Thus the reader not only discovers about the books that interested him as a child and young man but incidents he later saw as populating his fiction--although he claims to have been unaware of it at the time of his writing.
Too, there are especially interesting notes towards the end. Greene learned much from his initial lack of success. And he describes what amounts to a guideline for writing that rejected the imitative failures he produced for Doubleday and Hienemann following the surprise success of The Man Within.
There is much atmosphere and mood to his description of working at The Times as a sub editor. And it is equally appealing to see his descriptions of working with his editors at Heinemann and Doubleday. This was the heyday of the novel, a literary age that is all but unrecognizable to the contemporary world. The Western world itself, of course, was much more literary. Newspapers provided for the immediacy of news, while novels and magazines devoted to short stories outpaced even the motion pictures as a venue for entertainment and enlightenment. And Greene was there in its midst, almost failing. So near was he to doing so that he came close to accepting a teaching appointment at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. The book ends on his meeting with his friend, the department chair at the university, who offered him the job. It is some twenty years later, and Greene remarks upon the man's once promising career as a poet, which he allowed to slip away because of initial failures, leading to his exile in Siam. Only by the surprise success of Stamboul Train did Greene himself escape the same fate.