I found this version of the (audio)book while searching on YouTube for free audiobooks, and stumbling upon audiobook “trailers” (a new genre of videos, for me) to an “award-winning” narration of Graham Greene’s book, The End of the Affair, featuring British actor Colin Firth. I have read the book before, certainly, but this perked up my attention. I was not disappointed; Firth’s reading has depth - his words and the world that he portrays have depth, they “have been lived in”. I would also say that Firth is now at just the right age to read aloud such a text that expresses a certain tiredness with existence, of having hurt and having been hurt – which is what the main character of the book exhibits and does.
It also
helps that I have not read the book in a good while, and that I’ve also seen the not-so-good movie adaptation (featuring Ralph Fiennes and Julianne
Moore); all of this contributed to blurring out the details of the plot, and to
making me forget the tone of the book. Although I wonder if I’ve really
perceived this tone before, when I read the book before - or if I did so fully. If
not, that might have to do both with age – my age when I read the book vs. my
age now, and also with how this tone is conveyed by Colin Firth’s
reading.
And it is this
specific tone that most stands out from (listening to) this book. Firth
conveys it masterfully: it is weary, most of all; cynical (but not in a cheap way);
spiritually bitter and angry; somewhere deep down, at the deepest levels
of the self, perhaps almost crying. Of course, this is all “underneath” the
text; what we hear and understand at the beginning is only
(or mostly) the world-weariness, and the expressed anger of the main
character and narrator of the story, Bendrix (what a good choice for his name!). After finishing the story, however, we understand what's been underneath all along, from the beginning; as the story is told in retrospective, by the person who
actually lived through it, already in the tone of the beginning of the narration there are the
echoes of the end - “of the affair.”
So
listening to this narration brought it (the story, the book) to life in a way
that I sincerely did not expect. I have been using audiobooks, for the past few years, to
fill some of my long drives, and especially when coming back from hiking; yet
most of the audiobooks that I have thus consumed have been on the lighter side,
because I did not want to “waste” a good (or “real”) book, by listening
to it (which I found, and in a way still find, to be a more superficial engagement
with the text), before I actually read the text. However, listening to a book that you’ve already read works, works very well.
I am referring here, of course, to real books, to real literature; e.g. one should actually "read" Dostoevsky, before “listening” to a rendition of it. (There is something about the encounter with the text, versus that with the sound of it. There are some exceptions, which I will talk about later.) Having thus listened to mostly easier fare, beforehand, (of the John
Grisham kind, let’s say), the juxtaposition of that kind of writing with -
well, real writing - was, although by no means surprising, still quite revelatory and informative. Yet again, it illustrated the difference between real literature (and superior actor’s craft), on the one hand – and, broadly speaking, tosh or commercial fare, on
the other. The difference? - one could call it of existential depth, namely of how close the thing is
to life – as lived, in its polysemantic complexity, depth and breadth, and
eventual inexpressibility.
And,
speaking of “tone,” I remember that I was somewhat surprised by the tone and “position“
on which the book actually ended; I did not remember him choosing, so to speak,
the bleak nothingness, the dull non-committal, the temporal limbo... at the end.
Here is a montage with short interviews and excerpts from reading sessions - to Colin Firth’s audiobook of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair:
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