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Title: Loser Takes All by Graham Greene ISBN: 0-14-018542-9 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: "Human beings are capable of the most simple errors."
Comment: Bertram is a middle-aged accountant employed by a large firm when he comes to the attention of the company director, Dreuther. Bertram has a nice quiet, modest wedding planned followed by a honeymoon in Bournemouth--this is all that he and his fiance, Cary can afford, but when Druether hears of their plans, he offers to send them--at his expense--to Monte Carlo. The plan is that Bertram and Cary will marry in romantic Monte Carlo, and then board Dreuther's yacht for an extended honeymoon around the coast of Italy. Bertram pressured to provide a honeymoon that is the equivalent of the one endured in Paris with his first wife, "Dirty," accepts Druether's offer.
The plan goes horribly wrong when Dreuther fails to arrive in Monte Carlo as arranged. Bertram and Cary rapidly run out of money, and Bertram, with his fascination with numbers, develops a system for playing roulette. Their relationship and their love is tested--first by the poverty they are immediately reduced to, and then by Bertram's winning streak as his "system" at the roulette wheel begins to work. But as Bertram carts off big winnings from the table, he discovers he is about to lose something very, very precious.
This slight novel (just over 120 pages) fascinated me to the very last page. Greene analyses human nature using the seductiveness of money, and shows how the corrupting and insatiable hunger for money destroys love, faith, character, and prudence. The amoral Dreuther is one of the most fascinating literary characters I've discovered in recent years (he reminds me very much of a character from a Balzac novel), and his role in this novel is both chilling and sublime.
Rating: 4
Summary: Clever Story
Comment: Obviously Graham Greene is a great storyteller. There's a lot of sarcasm in his writing, which I love. This is about a mediocre accountant, Bertram, marrying for the second time to a women much younger than himself. They are both stranded in Monte Carlo, and much to his new wife's chagrin, he becomes obsessed with a gambling system which starts to work for him. "Loser Takes All" has a good twist at the end. Actually, I was surprised by the end of this book, not only by what happened, but how the tone seemed to change completely. I fully expected something different.
Maybe the story itself didn't interest me all that much. I wouldn't say it was fantastic or anything. It was all right. Still, this was the first Graham Greene book I've read, and I'm sure it won't be the last.
Rating: 3
Summary: A Clever Thought Experiment
Comment: Graham Greene's 1955 novella, "Loser Takes All," is a clever thought experiment in which love, morality, and ethics are all brought to bear on the early days of a married relationship. One of Greene's most appealing moves in the book is his delineation of character. The people who populate the novella are character types struggling to become characters - to find individuality and meaning in a world whose sole virtue seems to be money.
"Loser Takes All" begins in Monte Carlo. An English couple, Bertram, a fortyish accountant with a dead end career; and Cary, his twentyish fiance are on the verge of marriage - but they've been sidetracked. Initially planning on a small church service, Bertram is called into a meeting with his abstracted and unapproachable boss, Dreuther. Although Bertram isn't well-off, Dreuther talks him into moving his marriage plans to Monte Carlo, where Dreuther will rendezvous with them, and bring them back to England on his yacht. The action of the novella shows how this change of plans affects absolutely everything in Bertram and Cary's lives.
This is a short work, but it is packed with important and compelling themes. Greene was an absolute craftsman of language and situation, and the major themes that his longer works explore are found even in this short entertainment. Human relationships are central to the novella - the central relationship between Bertram and Cary is affected by Bertram's relationship with Dreuther, Dreuther's with 'another' of the firm's shareholders, Blixon. Greene asks how sympathies are constructed and maintained in good times and in bad.
Money and chance are also extremely important to the overarching theme of gambling and roulette. Characters like Bertram and character types like Phillippe and Bird's Nest illustrate the tensions in viewing life's progression as a matter of necessity or one of chance. Again, "Loser Takes All" is a short work, and is valuable as a kind of synopsis of the issues Greene's impressive literary corpus consistently engages with. The three star rating is because, in the context of Greene's body of work alone, "Loser Takes All" is a good piece, but not a great one.
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Title: Ministry of Fear (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140185364 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 1978 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene ISBN: 0142437301 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 25 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Man Within by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140185305 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1994 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Stamboul Train: An Entertainment by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140185321 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 November, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: A Gun for Sale (20th Century Classics) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140185402 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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