A Sort of Life

Fülszöveg

"If I had known it, the whole future must have lain all the time along those Berkham-sted streets."
With this sentence, so recognizably from the pen of the most distinguished living novelist in the English language, Graham Greene begins his autobiography, a masterpiece of controlled and precise self-examina-tion, fascinating for its observations, memories, recollections, for the sheer pleasure of reading a great artist writing about himself —equally fascinating because in the story of his childhood, youth and early years as a writer, he reveals the conscious and unconscious elements that formed the style and provided the material for his novels: characters, minutely observed, who re-emerge in different forms in his books and plays; incidents, phrases, impressions from his own life that are echoed and transfigured in his fiction.
Written without irony, as if there were no foreknowledge of the man and writer he -was to become, A Sort of Life describes Greene's childhood in the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

"If I had known it, the whole future must have lain all the time along those Berkham-sted streets."
With this sentence, so recognizably from the pen of the most distinguished living novelist in the English language, Graham Greene begins his autobiography, a masterpiece of controlled and precise self-examina-tion, fascinating for its observations, memories, recollections, for the sheer pleasure of reading a great artist writing about himself —equally fascinating because in the story of his childhood, youth and early years as a writer, he reveals the conscious and unconscious elements that formed the style and provided the material for his novels: characters, minutely observed, who re-emerge in different forms in his books and plays; incidents, phrases, impressions from his own life that are echoed and transfigured in his fiction.
Written without irony, as if there were no foreknowledge of the man and writer he -was to become, A Sort of Life describes Greene's childhood in the apparent security of an in-
(Continued on back flap)
6.95
(Continued from front flap)
tellectual Edwardian family (a security shot through with ambivalence and disturbing perceptions), his school years (as the son of headmaster and scholar), his years at Oxford (in which his adolescence reached its peak with a game of Russian roulette played with a loaded revolver), his involvement with the Secret Service (foreshadowing a lifelong interest in the grubby realities behind the façade of espionage), his apprenticeship as a journalist and his early years as a writer. . . .
In his own words, "I have preferred to finish this essay with the years of failure which followed the acceptance of my first novel. Failure too is a kind of death: the furniture sold, the drawers emptied, the removal van waiting like a hearse in the lane to take one to a less expensive destination. In another sense too a book like this can only be 'a sort of life,' for in the course of sixty-six years I have spent almost as much time with imaginary characters as with real men and women."
Jacket design by Wendell Minor Vissza