Rating: 4/4 (Excellent read)
Trying to get out of a reading slump, I picked up A Sense Of Reality. At a petite 110 pages, I was pretty sure I could read this collection of 4 short stories by Graham Greene over the weekend.
In Under The Garden, a man afflicted with cancer returns to his old country home to relive a fantasy involving treasure he had experienced in his childhood. A Visit To Morin is a story where a man meets an old author whose books had impressed him in his young age. Now it turns out that the author has none of those earlier beliefs and the two debate about it over pegs of brandy. In Dream Of A Strange Land, a patient who has discovered that he has leprosy tries to convince his doctor to allow him to continue to work in public. And finally, in A Discovery In The Woods, a bunch of children in an isolated fishing village make a fascinating discovery. I loved the last story the most in the book.
This is the first book by Greene I have read. I had only heard about him whenever R. K. Narayan was mentioned. The short stories certainly have a bit of that RKN flavour and a lot of the quaint old English too. If you like reading RKN, it is hard to not like this one. Excellently suited for an afternoon read.
timefarer π 