Twenty-One Stories by Graham Greene

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Two stories stood out to me. The first was of a middle-age English couple who go to Paris on vacation. The wife wants to see something risque. The time period is between the wars. The husband ends up taking his wife to see a "blue movie," a term I had not heard or read in years. At the end of the movie the male actor in the film turns and faces the camera. It is the first time in the film that the audience sees the man's face. Of course it is our character in the story. He is not proud of his performance. His wife, it turns out, is far more interested in knowing who the female performer is. She seems not at all surprised to discover that her husband is in the film, which had been made more than 20 years in the past.

The second story that remains with me is set during the blitz. An old man who lives alone in a large house somehow has his house survive the bombing. All the other houses in the neighborhood have been destroyed. A gang of teenage boys take offense to the situation. The manage to lock the old man in his own outhouse and proceed to destroy the house themselves.



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