111. Strait is the Gate (Andre Gide, 1909)
Genre: love and religious straits
Rating: 6
Two sisters love one guy. The younger gives him up so the older can have him. The older gives him up so God can have him. The guy is left understandably crushed and confused.
Unfortunately, I was left even more confused. Both sisters give up life along with the guy, the first settling into a placid, meaningless domestic life, the other believing her act a religious martyrdom and, congruent to that belief, wasting away unto death. The first I could understand, but the second left me baffled, even given excerpts from the girl’s diary. The style is extremely delicate, feeling as if it’s barely touching the surface of its subject; maybe that makes it hard to understand if one doesn’t intuitively grasp what it’s touching on. Or maybe I just read it wrong.
Quote: “Then you think that one can keep a hopeless love in one’s heart for as long as that?…And that life can breathe upon it every day, without extinguishing it?”
112. The End of the Affair (Graham Greene, 1951)
Genre: how love relates to religion, again
Rating: 8
With a gloriously bitter narrator and brutally intense emotion, Greene analogizes religious faith to love. Like in Strait is the Gate, the core narrative consists of a woman sacrificing her love to save her loved one (there’s even a diary to explain her actions, too). But in this case her sacrifice is born not from some vague martyrdom or a vaguer notion of saving his soul, but from desperate emotion and a deal with God to save his life (a la Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice). In Strait is the Gate, the sacrifice leads only to confusion and misery, and if anything, causes the loved one to lose his faith; in The End of the Affair, the sacrifice is the inception of the narrator’s faith—though he is not gladdened by the gain of it. He struggles against both love and faith, against how they take him beyond himself, make him feel under the power of something else, but he is inexorably entangled by them, and Greene explores the vagaries of these entanglements with searing incisiveness. Although I can understand having faith, I have trouble understanding how one can get it (without being raised into it, that is). But by likening it to love, and by incisively studying the course of both, Greene makes it understandable.
Unfortunately, all the secondary characters are lame caricatures, and there are some half-assed subplots muddying the brilliance. But they’re easily forgotten; in fact, I have forgotten them.
Quote: I’ve caught belief like a disease. I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love.
113. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy, 1891)
Genre: contrived miserablism
Rating: 4
Fussy, lame-simile-laden prose endlessly describing countrysides. A rough jackass who forcefully seduces (that is, old-timey date-rapes) the heroine, a poor country lass. A resolutely dopey but ostensibly chivalrous and free-thinking guy who views the heroine not as a person but, befitting his dopiness, as a lame ideal of unsullied country lasses. An absurdly passive heroine whom social norms insist is sullied by having been seduced; though not the lame ideal the dope would have her be, she is presented by the book itself as little more than a symbol of a natural, innocent, unsullied soul. For no apparent reason, she worships (literally) the dope and suffers terribly because of it. This could be explained by love’s propensity for blindness, but every other girl in the dope’s vicinity also falls despairingly in love with him, again for no apparent reason…which really fits pretty well with the book’s unifying style: all things contrived to serve simplistic philosophizing; characters who are more cogs than people. For most of the book, Tess is made to suffer by society’s (and aforementioned dope’s) backward notions of sulliedness; in the end, the book asserts it’s not just society, but Nature and Fate themselves that have made her their plaything. I blame Hardy instead.
Quote: Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess’s being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her—doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there.
114. The Heart of the Matter (Graham Greene, 1948)
Genre: torment…also love and religion again
Rating: 8
I guess Greene torments his characters almost as much as Hardy does. But Greene does it proper, with hard, wearied prose and a protagonist who destroys himself—just a guy worn down by life, getting himself into an impossible situation by falling in love, dragging himself ever deeper into it the more acutely he’s aware of its suffocating impossibility, oblivious to the realities outside it. He also sacrifices his soul for the sake of his wife, as was the style at the time. Contains one of the most emotionally grueling sequences of scenes in literature, an immensity of Catholic guilt, despair, and terror.
Quote: He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one’s hands altogether by death.
existentialism is a film 
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