A World of My Own:a dream Diary

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

For 25 years novelist Greene recorded his dreams. His interior dream work played a substantial role in his writing, helping him to overcome writing blocks and even inspiring a few of his short stories. The dreams in this slim, posthumous volume were carefully chosen by Graham during the last months of his life. The world they represent is Greene's alone, because, as he says in the introduction, there are no witnesses. There are, of course, some impressive personalities, equally impressive locales, and scenes of despair and danger, delight and happiness. The reader should be prepared to meet, fleetingly, such notables as Sartre, Henry James, Solzhenitsyn, King Leopold, and Pope John Paul II. The locale may be the Vatican garden, a house party, a river trip, or a room with Goebbels sitting in a gilt armchair. The dreams are told simply, without adornment, yet they are brimming with effort and energy; this is a creative firmament not entirely at rest. For all those who dream.-Robert L. Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., Ind. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Greene (1904-1991) had extraordinarily vivid, fertile, inventive dreams, judging from these excerpts from the dream diaries he kept between 1965 and 1989. The novelist/essayist's dreams of espionage included a mission to Nazi Germany, where he rammed a poison cigarette up Joseph Goebbels's nose, and a secret assignation with Kim Philby. In other dreams he met three popes; took a disagreeable boat ride to Bogota with Henry James; conversed with Castro, Khrushchev, Oliver Cromwell, Jean Cocteau and Solzhenitsyn; witnessed a massacre of children in Syria; produced a blank-verse play with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. He dreamed of his mother's death, of a talking kitten, of committing murder and robbery. This curious, entertaining diary lets us glimpse the feverish inner life of an intensely private man, providing an uncanny mirror-image of Greene's novelistic obsessions, insecurities and moral preoccupations. In the introduction he divulges that a number of his short stories evolved directly from dreams. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Greene was a consistently prolific writer of novels, short stories, travel pieces, essays, criticism, plays, and screenplays over the course of his long, adventurous, and zealously guarded life. He was also an avid and expert movie buff who became a forthright and brilliant film critic as well as a screenwriter and producer. The Graham Greene Film Reader gathers together a wealth of Greene's piquant and instructive writings about film. The entire first half of this well-edited treasury consists of Greene's shrewd and uncompromising movie reviews from 1929 through 1940. While Greene goes in for the kill when writing about films he despised, he positively rejoices in masterpieces such as Fritz Lang's Fury. Greene explains that Fury is "great" because it "allowed no value to slip" and it "conveyed completely by sound and image better than by any other medium the pity and terror of the story." There can be no higher praise. Stories, of course, are at the heart of great movies, a fact Greene stresses in his frank discussions of the making of The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949), films based on his fiction and screenplay, respectively. Editor Parkinson has included a selection of book reviews, interviews, and letters, such as Greene's open letter of support to Charlie Chaplin in 1952, to round off this marvelous anthology. During the last months of his life, Greene, a man devoted to privacy, nevertheless decided that he would like to publish a carefully selected "dream diary," hence the posthumous A World of My Own. Greene had made a lifelong habit of recording his dreams, utterly fascinated by their drama, humor, suspense, and unsettling blend of past, present, and future. Because dreams are the only world wholly one's own, Greene refers to them as "My Own World" and waking life as the "Common World." His choices of dreams for inclusion in this unusual volume are purposefully entertaining and deliberately impersonal, at least as much as any dream can be. That is, he included no dreams about sex or love. Instead, Greene shares his briskly told dreams about war, the secret service, travel, films, and famous people such as Henry James, Solzhenitsyn, Charles de Gaulle, Khrushchev, Ho Chi Minh, and various popes, kings, and queens. This intriguing and perfectly composed little book challenges the widely held belief that people hate to listen to other people's dreams. Or perhaps it's just that Greene not only wrote better than nearly everyone else, he also dreamed better. --Donna Seaman

Kirkus Book Review

Though not in a league with those of Coleridge or Joyce, Greene's dreams compose an alternate autobiography of his private self in matter-of-factly unreal vignettes. Culled from the thick journals of his dreams that Greene (The Last Word, 1991, etc.) obsessively kept in his vigorous old age, and posthumously published in accordance with his expressed wish, this slim volume catalogs his adventures and escapades in what he called ``My Own World,'' as opposed the shared reality of ``The Common World.'' In these dreams, his encounters with the famous- -Khrushchev, Edward Heath, Queen Elizabeth--often seem dull and ordinary; his travels possess only recycled verisimilitude compared to the Haiti, Vietnam, and Cuba we see in his novels; and his literary reveries betray an innocent craving for approval from the likes of Cocteau, D.H. Lawrence, and Sartre. The most curious and intriguing dreams magnify Greene's fantastic side and combine it with an uncharacteristically carefree humor. Those in which he is a criminal or a spy (in one, assigned to assassinate Goebbels with poisoned second-hand cigarette smoke) seem to parody his own semi-parodic thrillers. Some of the more surreal literary vignettes--a trip on a South American riverboat with Henry James; a guerrilla campaign with Evelyn Waugh against W.H. Auden--are hilarious pulp belles lettres. Larger issues of religion and imagination, however, are less amplified here than in his waking corpus and are typically reduced to altercations with sloppy priests or comments about the neurotic drudgery of producing books. The few brief examples of dream-inspiration and theophany are unsatisfactorily developed and give no real clue to his creative process or religious life. A uniquely candid self-portrait, but Greene's inner world only adumbrates his real-world exploits and the world he consciously created in his fiction.