It's been awhile since I've read any Graham Greene. A long while. And the Greene I've read in the last 10 years has been Norman Sherry's massive biography, Gloria Emerson Loving Graham Greene, and... oh, there was a slight little volume of his Kurtzian trip up the Congo.
I picked up the bundling of two of his novellas -- The Third Man & The Fallen Idol -- for a dollar and set it aside for the trip home. Disappointing? No. But they are no The Power and the Glory. Nor am I the same -- boy? man? -- that read Power and The Comedians and Our Man in Havana and... I kind of miss that boy. Not wholly, but for the way things sang in me.
And it's rather odd, let me tell you, to be reading Graham Greene and thinking about Joan Didion. The narrative trope of Greene's "The Third Man" -- the reconstruction of events from notes, testimony, personal recollection, files -- reminds me so much of Didion's novels. Don't ask me which ones, I'm not home with my library. Not Play It As It Lays but maybe The Last Thing He Wanted? Democracy? A Book of Common Prayer?
I love Didion. I loved Greene. I love my memory of Greene (which is vague and dreamy and wrapped up with crossing myself in European cathedrals).
Because now, of course, different things sing. Which is why I keep reading. And which is why I'm looking forward to finishing up Sherry and reading Greene's selected letters. And why, one day, I am sure I'll reread The Power and the Glory and ache and wonder why. Again. It's just, now, I'm not expecting an answer.
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