I have not read any of The Brothers Karamozov this week. I hope to get to it sometime soon. What's happened is that I've been working on a project, which requires my attention on the train when I'm heading home. Well, it actually doesn't require my time then, but that's when I like to work on this project. If you want to know more, check out my Night Nurse blog. It should be over on the side there.

Anyway, I have been reading something else, though, Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter. I actually really like Greene's work, and I got into him after seeing The Third Man, which is a great pic for Orson Welles. The Heart of the Matter is refreshing in a lot of ways, not least because it's pretty straight forward, and it's pretty tight, at least compared to Brothers. The difference, of course, is that Greene wasn't serializing this, whereas Dostoyevsky was.

Heart is about a cop named Scobie who works in Sierra Leone for the Brits (he is a Brit) during WWII. His wife, Louise, is something of a whiner who doesn't like SL. She wants to move to South Africa. Scobie, not having a lot of money, borrows from a local Syrian merchant since the bank won't give him the cash. Once his wife is gone, he meets a young French woman who literally washes up on shore after a boat sinks. That's about as far as I've gotten in the book, and even though I didn't know what was going to happen until I read the description on Amazon.com, I have been caught up in it.

I read somewhere that Heart is a fairly personal book for Greene, though I can't imagine it being any more personal than The Quiet American or The End of the Engagement (both great books, by the way). They all deal with the same things, adultery, longing, love, loss, and so on. In the case of Heart, it seems Greene stacked the deck a little in Scobie's favor, since Louise is rather unattractive as a character. Whatever happens next - and it's not hard to guess since the French chippy arrived - I figure it'll be pretty good.