What we're reading, what we're liking
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
Graham Greene's wartime love story of Maurice Bendrix and Sarah Miles, who's cheating on her passionless husband, is about sacrifice and religion, but most remarkably about Maurice's jealousy. Maurice's love for the more mysterious Sarah develops into an all-consuming possessiveness, and Greene is brilliant at expressing the ungovernable and claustrophobic way that jealousy takes hold of Maurice's mind. (So well, in fact, that it will scratch at your own old wounds.) But Bendrix seems to embrace his obsession, repeatedly torturing himself about how much he loves Sarah as if that suffering proves his devotion. When his rival turns out to be something almost inexplicable -- not another lover -- Greene takes Maurice's ideas about lasting, fulfilling love and turns them upside down. It's a sorrowful book but not a dispiriting one; for all their heartbreak, Greene's characters are breathlessly alive.
-- Suzy Hansen
Recent books praised by Salon's critics
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The Last Opium Den by Nick Tosches
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The Sweetest Dream by Doris Lessing
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[02/21/2002]
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[01/24/02]
Nigger: The Strange Case of a Troublesome Word by Randall Kennedy
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[12/07/2001]
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[12/06/2001]
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[12/06/2001]
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
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[12/06/2001]
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[12/06/2001]
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[12/06/2001]
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[12/06/2001]
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[12/03/01]
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[10/24/01]
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[10/08/01]
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[10/04/01]
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[09/25/01]
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[09/06/01]
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[08/30/01]
Beauty and the Beasts by Carole Jahme
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[08/23/01]
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[08/22/01]
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Reviewed by Andrew O'Hehir
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[08/02/01]
The Sappho Companion by Margaret Reynolds
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[08/01/01]
Searching for John Ford by Joseph McBride
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[07/31/01]
How to Be Good by Nick Hornby
An Angry Guy morphs into a do-gooder in the latest from the author of "High Fidelity" and "About a Boy."
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[07/25/01]
A Cold Case by Philip Gourevitch
From the author of "We Wish to Inform You" comes the true story of a detective who, almost 30 years later, hunted down a murderer the police never caught.
Reviewed by Charles Taylor
[07/18/01]
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