Rating: 
Summary: Engaging read on personal and universal morality
Review: Graham Greene, arguably one of the most important British writers of the 20th century, does more than write a little expose on the difficulties of being Catholic during WWII - he expresses the turmoil experienced by anyone who has struggled with belief, desire, hope and conviction. There's never a sure victor in such struggles - our choices sometimes waver and are shifted by forces we can't perceive - but are still ultimately our choice. This can be read as a light read, but will pull at you to read more into it. This can be read as a soul-searching exercise - but not tiresome. The prose is simple and elegant, making for both a lovely story and a lovely parable.
Rating:
Summary: A Challenge
Review: Can there be a better book yet written? A superbly written story of the relationship between human and divine love and the very core emotions at the heart of love itself. Not for the faint hearted and those who are expecting bonk buster meets tear jerker.
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Summary: End of the Affair
Review: My husband read this book for a relgion class in college and I picked it up about four years ago to do some light summer reading. I do not recommend this book for that purpose. At that point I found it hard to get into and put it down, with the intention of never picking it up again. However, when the film version was released this winter I decided to read it (I always read the book before viewing the film). This time I found it to be very compelling. This is an intellectually satisfying book. It has a love story, but also brings in religion and gives one something to think about. I particularly like the characterization of Bendrix. Good read...try it.
Rating: 
Summary: WOULD PROBABLY BE BETTER THE SECOND TIME AROUND
Review: My impetus in reading this book was that I like to read a book before seeing the movie. Since I didn't really enjoy the book, I never got around to the movie. I definitely think this is the type of book that has to be reread because so much of the beginning of the book is confusing. Once into the story, however, you realize that the love triangle is not between Sarah, her husband Henry and her lover Maurice but between Sarah, Maurice and God. This kind of hit me like a ton of bricks because I felt it came out of left field. Considering that the book was written in 1951, it has withstood the test of time. There are very few indications which would lead one to believe that almost 50 years have passed since its publication. I read somewhere that when this book was published, it was considered scandalous. In today's time, I found it boring. Since the God thing really threw me, I did some research into Graham Greene only to find out that he was born in 1904 and was baptized a Catholic in 1927 after apparently meeting and falling in love with the Catholic Vivienne. I knew that there had to be a connection between this book and the author's real life. I would liken this book to the movie The Sixth Sense. Anyone who has seen this movie would probably like to see it again just to see the clues they missed along the way. It's the same thing with this book -- I went back after finishing it and everything seemed to fall into place. Throughout the book Sarah keeps referring to YOU with capital letters. I thought she was referring to Maurice but, of course, she was referring to God. Did I like this book? Probably not. Would I like it better the second time around? Most definitely. "Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time", Graham Greene -- End of the Affair.
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Summary: Excellent Study of Human Emotion
Review: This book embodies all of the emotion of a forbidden love. The love and the hate of each moment is central in this novel. One can feel that they are in the middle of this relationship. Sarah is such a complex and feeling character; she is perfectly written. All of the psychological aspects are pulled together to make an intensely powerful book. If you can relate at all to this type of story, it will leave you riveted. Enjoy!
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Summary: Saint Sarah
Review: In Sarah Miles, Graham Greene created one of the most compelling figures in western literature. She embodies both sensuality and spirituality as two sides of the same personality. They key to Sarah is love. Love as duty to Henry, as sexuality to Bendrix and, ultimately, as devotion to the God she tries desperately to resist. Perhaps Greene intended Sarah to be thought of as a Saint in Heaven. She is now my Patron Saint.
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Summary: The best book I have read in five years
Review: This book is so unbelievable! It is difficult to describe why it is such a perfect read. It probably has something to do with the fact that as you are reading it, you find yourself wanting to read the same paragraph over and over again because Greene's writing is so nuanced--if you don't watch out, you will miss something very important. At the same time, the story is both heart-wrenching and funny in a clever way. If you have ever been madly in love, this is the book to read because Greene effectively depicts all of the "right" emotions. Pick it up: you will not be sorry you did. This is my first Greene novel, and it will definitely not be my last!
Rating: 
Summary: What do I come away with after reading this? Nothing new
Review: I hate to write a negative review of a literary classic because it suggests a lack of literary sophistication, i.e., you "didn't get it," but I have to admit, I have gotten 2/3rds of the way through "End of The Affair" and believe I have reached the End of my Attention Span. As a former lit major, I have actually enjoyed a few callow adultry narratives with god as the nebulous 3rd or 4th party in the story, and I understand that novels don't have to involve a single likeable or understandable character to be worth reading. But what good novels must provide in the absense of compelling character development is involving and lyrical prose about morals, society, family, politics, something that will cause the reader to feel engaged. John Updike and John Stienbeck have both written great social commentary novels without likeable character development. "The End of the Affair" lacks both character development and challenging social commentary. The affair itself is too abstract, clinical, and lacking details to convince me that anything other than the personal dramas of two-dimensional people are at stake. I don't think this book adds anything in the way of a compelling statement about love, adultry, or religion. To boot, it is written in overly formal and aggravatingly pretentious 19th century style that isn't well suited to conveying passion or immediacy. Finally, it seems the main characters hardly love at all, but rather engage in a sort of bored and banal form of jealousy to convince themselves they are alive. Well, I wasn't convinced, all due respect to anyone who saw literary value in this book.
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Summary: A tragedy Shakespeare himself would love
Review: Forbidden love against the backdrop of war sets the place for this beautifully written love story. It is London after the war when Bendrix and Henry meet again. Henry is suspicious of his wife Sarah, convinced that she is seeing someone. Bendrix offers to go to the private investigator on his behalf. Bendrix though, has a motive. He wants to know why Sarah ended their affair during the war so abruptly. The story goes between the affair during the war and the period after the war when Bendrix is searching for answers. Sarah comes to represent the tragic heroine that Shakespeare has so often written about. Divided between her love of Bendrix and what is morally right ( divorcing her husband) Sarah can only be seen as tragic. Yet, Bendrix and Henry in their own way are tragic too.
Rating:
Summary: One of the great novels of the century
Review: This story has been described as a "love triangle" between the narrator Bendrix, Sarah, and her husband Henry, but it is really more a story of three people revolving like planets around a fourth, unseen, yet pivotal character--God, whose existence remains to the end neither affirmed nor rejected.Graham Greene belongs to what I would call the school of nomads and heartbroken cynics. He travelled the world, he viewed it with an intelligent yet humane mixture of compassion and disgust, and he struggled to the end to give man some hope while at the same time viewing man's condition with utterly unsentimental realism. It was a difficult balancing act. Greene was too intelligent to accept the cardboard God of the sentimental and the superstitious, but he realized too that without a belief in some transcendent order in the universe man was liable to destroy himself within the dark tentacles of war, greed, obsession, betrayal, and despair. At the same time, he was acutely aware that this belief in a higher power could itself lead down the very same hole. It is precisely Sarah's belated discovery of faith that ruins any chance of her attaining happiness. Greene's genius in this novel is to set this grand metaphysical drama of man and faith as a background against the foreground of a passionate, mature romance. These two tragic themes, the impossibility of love and the impossibility of faith, combined with man's absolute inability to live without either, resonate with one another to create an almost unbearably moving work of art. I can't remember the last time I wept reading a novel, but there were moments reading The End of the Affair when a turn of phrase made my throat clench and the tears well in my eyes. This is a work of power, feeling, intelligence, and nuance. It deserves to be considered one of the great novels of the century. Do not hesitate to read it.
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