I read A Sense Of Reality which is a collection of 4 GG short stories, but I could not find it on this site to add. GG does reality, seering hard edged human reality in all his best novels. In this collection however, the stories all have touches of fantasy, which is an unusual departure. Only 100 pages, flew through this in a day thanks to CTA delays making my commute this morning over an hour. Sort it out Daley, you crook.

Greene is a marvel in the short form, as he is in the long.

Did I read all of these stories? No. Have I been through enough and do I deserve to count it anyways? Yes and yes.

Complete Short Stories by Graham Greene

Here are the stories that I really liked.

1. The Blue Film - a risqué story about a husband and wife overseas who go to see a smut show where they recognize one of the actors.

2. A Drive in the Country - a young lady gets into trouble with a dangerous man.

3. The Basement Room - a masterpiece. A man recalls a tragic incident when he was a small boy involving the family butler.

4. The Last Word - A sci-fi story involving the last Christian on a futuristic Earth.

3.5 stars. Greene is one of my favorite novelists but the majority of the 52 stories here in this collection were just too short. Greene’s writing style is more of a slow burn.

Got through the first half or so before I had to return it to the library. Loved the stories I read so far. Will probably pick this one up again at some point in the future.

Nice

too much early twentieth century british anti-big-brother commentary. and i'm not one to fall asleep while reading but the sheer density of his style (admittedly another product of when he's writing) has a narcoleptic effect. it's just not for me.

that being said, i recommend you just pick this book up at the bookstore and read the very first story and reshelve it. the first story is worth it, entirely downhill after that.

Let's forget the stories that read like GG parodies
and focus on some of the best that quiver with irony
and humor. "A Branch of the Service" is a daft comedy
about a spy whose cover is that of a food critic. Thick
soups, rare meats, cheeses and desserts almost kill him.
"May We Borrow Your Husband?" is a distress signal about
sexual naivete: 'The dream wouldn't last.' The universality
of an unlikely tumble is explored lustily in "Cheap in
August" and then there's "The Blue Film," wherein a
discontented wife howls with desire when she learns her
husband, as a youth, made a porn pic. GG serves the driest
and coldest martini. His shaker doesn't bruise the ice.

Since I first ever saw Donnie Darko in 2001, Ive wanted to read "The Destructors". Finally, 15 years later, had the chance to so, and it did not disappoint in the least. Take a break after each one. I used them to spark my dreams for a month.

A master. Collection is uneven, but his best is as good as anyone.

Whether you liked or disliked "Atonement" -- and I haven't read it, just know everything that happens -- read Graham Greene's marvelous story "The Basement Room," which may well have informed the Briony character, except that this protagonist is the young son of the French ambassador to London, alone at the embassy one weekend with the butler, whom he adores, and his cruel wife, and witnesses something he gravely misinterprets. Graham's evocation of a child's consciousness -- the deafness to nuance, the indifference to code, the hapless efforts to mimic adult speech (that is, to lie) -- is one of the more honest. (Carol Reed's film adaptation, "The Fallen Idol," is even better.)

Criticizing Graham Greene in a review is almost like Leo Tolstoy criticizing Shakespeare as overrated. Who has the right, except someone like George Orwell? A highly prolific novelist and writer in several genres, Greene was widely renowned for his work and even nominated for the Nobel. Getting into criticism of an author who almost achieves 'classic' status seems the wrong kind of vanity.

I don't like Graham Greene. I don't like him as a person. He strikes me as the sort you couldn't ever be close to because his Roman Catholic bigotry would always get in the way, and I say that as a Catholic myself. You could perhaps say the same about Evelyn Waugh, but somehow I rather feel I'd have liked Waugh. Something about his sense of the absurd combined with his humor. Waugh wrote fairly serious stuff, but he also wrote things like 'Scoop,' which is hilarious.

Greene does rise to the level of the amusing, and his tales are well structured and paced (immaculately so sometimes). But his primary aim in fiction, it seems, is to be vicious. He wants to convey the sense that anyone who does not embrace the idea of a consecrated Catholic communion wafer being the only salvation for the misery of the human condition is hopeless, and deserves to live in misery forever. It's a spiteful and annoyingly superstitious attitude that simply doesn't sit well with me. Greene used to say something to the effect that anything about him that was worth anything was in his writing, and that the rest of it was 'just life,' or something like that. He didn't want anyone paying attention to his personal life. He only wanted appreciation as an artist.

Yet I can't forget what I know about Greene as a person when I'm reading him. He was a swine, by most accounts, and enjoyed inflicting psychological torture on his wife by bringing women home to their house and having his way with them there while Mrs. Greene was there. He was supposedly separated from his wife for the last 63 years of his life, yet of course he couldn't divorce her. It would have prevented him from receiving the wafer at Mass.

Nevertheless, his short stories are extremely well constructed, as anyone bothering to plow through this lot would agree. Some of the 53 stories in this collection are even extremely memorable, and have been made into screen productions for TV or cinema. 'Across the Bridge' (with Rod Steiger) and 'The Basement Room' (with Ralph Richardson) spring to mind, but there was also a British TV series called 'Shades of Greene' (1975-76) that featured many of the stories in this collection. I remember seeing one of these dramatized for TV (The Destructors) as a boy, and I never forgot it.

Greene could turn a phrase, and many of these stories are brilliant in their way. Some are terrible, but they're in the minority. Sadly, even the good ones have that kind of smug sanctimony about them, as if the main characters are all doomed because they haven't yet grasped the essential, critical value of embracing salvation as embodied in his own sect. Once you've done that, you can be as hypocritical as you like for the rest of your life. If you don't, all your efforts to be good are in vain.

Here is a classic quotation from the book, which appears at the end of the story 'Across the Bridge.' As such, it contains a SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER! So if you can't hack it, leave now. It's in the last paragraphs, and goes like this:

'It all seemed to me a little too touching to be true as the old crook lay there with his arm over the dog's neck, dead with his million between the money changers' huts, but it's as well to be humble in the face of human nature. He had come across the river for something, and it may, after all, have been the dog he was looking for. It sat there, baying its stupid and mongrel triumph across his body, like a piece of sentimental statuary: the nearest he could get to the fields, the ditches, the horizon of his home. It was comic and it was pitiable, but it wasn't less comic because the man was dead. Death doesn't change comedy to tragedy, and if that last gesture was one of affection, it was only one more indication of a human being's capacity for self-deception, our baseless optimism that is so much more appalling than our despair.'

So baseless optimism is 'appalling,' more so than desperation. As I said, it's spiteful, and it ridicules people generally as pathetic. That is Greene's way. If you can deal with it, keep going with it. But it's a fairly ghastly attitude in all, and I suspect it does nothing to improve the human condition in a way. Stories like 'May We Borrow Your Husband?' and 'Cheap In August' are quite simply brilliant in their way (iconic even), but damned if they don't leave a rancid taste in one's mouth. 4 stars for sheer ability.