Reading 1001 discussion

Rating: 4 stars

The story of an affair between a teenage boy and a woman whose husband was away fighting during WWI. This is a surprisingly mature view of such an affair, considering the author was only a teenager when he wrote it. Sadly, the author died at the age of 20 with few published works in his repertoire. I heard that a couple of films were made of the movie, and one of them was very explicit. The book version, however, was relatively tame.

This is an emotionally ruthless description of an affair between a boy of 16 and a married woman of 18 or 19. It was a runaway bestseller but it was also condemned because the female character's husband was a soldier fighting in WW1. I would have liked it more if I hadn't known from the introduction how the young author got his information and what damage that did to real people. But that doesn't detract from what a great a book it is, except for the melodramatic ending, which was imposed by publishers who thought the original ending was too nebulous.

Not my favorite. It is hard to care about a main character that is so self-centered and "seems to lack redeeming features" (to quote the afterword by Christopher Moncrieff). The same could be said of his lover, her parents, and his parents. I guess that's part of the point of the book -- to critique the hypocrisy of the middle-class. I'm just glad it was short.

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