5 books about female infidelity

1. “The end of one novel”

Author: Graham Greene

The novel is set in London during World War II. A love triangle – civil servant Henry Miles, his wife Sarah and her lover, writer Maurice Bendrix. During the bombing, Bendrix almost died, and Sarah promises to devote herself to God if her lover survives. Leaving the hospital, Maurice, obsessed with love and jealousy, tries to find out who he was preferred to.

The novel is autobiographical. Moreover, the real story had a continuation: the book itself caused Graham Greene to break up with the beautiful Katherine Walston. While the man suffered from jealousy for many years, the woman managed to comprehend the essence of a real feeling: “love does not end, even if we do not see each other.” (Foreigner, B.S.G.-Press, 2002).

Quote: “My dear, dear,” she said. “People love God, but they don’t see it, right? We don’t have that kind of love. “Sometimes I think there is no other way.”

2. The Way It Was by Julian Barnes

Author: Julian Barnes

The artist Gillian married a modest bank clerk, Stuart, and along with her husband received in the appendage a “talented loser”, Oliver. Oliver, Stuart’s best friend, fell in love with Gillian. The usual story. But the author gives the floor to the characters themselves, and they each tell this story on their own behalf, turning an ordinary plot into a witty and frank conversation about love. Each of them has his own explanation of what is happening and his own point of view on adultery and marriage. The reader can only listen to a fascinating conversation.

One of the best love triangles in English literature. The novel was awarded the French Femina Prize. In 2000, Barnes released a sequel to the story of the trio, “Love and so on.” (AST, 2003)

Quote: “Did you know that since 1973 divorce petitions filed in English courts by the male side have most often cited adultery as the reason? The question is, how do you think this characterizes women? Meanwhile, in opposite cases, the situation is different. Cheating husband is not the main reason why women in England require a divorce. Even vice versa. Drinking and avoiding sex are the reasons why women usually get rid of sexual partners.

3. “Tow truck. Novel and poems around the novel»

Author: Dmitry Bykov

Igor and Katya fell in love with each other at the most inopportune time: there are terrorist attacks in Moscow, everything is collapsing before our eyes, and they enjoy happiness for two and only sometimes remember what to say to “our husband”.

From the love chatter about “how to drop everything and go far away,” a fantastic image of a “tow truck” arises. Igor turns out to be an alien and is about to take his mistress, and at the same time the husband of his mistress and other relatives, to another planet. So it turns out to be more promising than a legal spouse – at least for the duration of the dates. The only “but”: the more the characters break the rules, the worse it gets in their native Moscow. (Vagrius, 2005)

Quote: “Katka sang under the shower. She deliberately bathed for a long time and noisily – it was necessary to delay happiness again and again, but meanwhile it was really late, the seventh hour, and for the first time the thought flashed through her – to spit on everything, to stay with him – but that was completely irresponsible; and in general it is necessary to look … How strange, now we will cheat on her husband. But what kind of betrayal is this? Happiness came and did not let go: happiness is when everything is possible.

4. “Aunt Motya”

Author: Maya Kucherskaya

Complicated, with two parallel lines, a novel about how to try to save a family after infidelity. The wife is an intelligent proofreader, the husband is a system administrator. He is into kitesurfing, she is into well-written lyrics. The heroine falls in love with one of the authors of such texts until she completely transforms from Marina into “Aunt Motya”. Even a small son does not save from love fever. But Kucherskaya is a very patient author, so the rebirth of the heroine will be described in detail and in stages, and with physiological details.

Of course, after Anna Karenina, all literary traitors are tested for stress resistance. In “Tete Mote” the heroine is also compared with the great and unfortunate predecessor. It turns out that sometimes they still return … to the Karenins. (Astrel, 2012)

Quote: “Running around in search of“ proximity ”for a period of three, mind you, years, is called treason. This is treason. But everything is so arranged with us, as if we are all terribly interested just in blurring, relaxing the essence of many words, those in particular that are connected with morality. Well, people are reluctant to think about it – why? Therefore, even the word of this, by the way, “treason” I have not heard for a long time. “He has an affair”, “he fell in love with another” – that’s all! And all world literature, in fact, simply misunderstood, and in many respects forgotten, and all films understood just right, in the inflamed consciousness of modern man, take the side of this next novel, fill it with meaning, charm. Because this is not a sin, not a banal adultery, this is Roman! Worthy of Turgenev’s pen or there … Bunin, whom, by the way, I can’t stand.

5. “Light Worlds”

Author: Tatyana Tolstaya

An affair with a foreigner, and even in a distant American province, where you definitely won’t return – such a plot is untwisted in Tatyana Tolstaya’s story “Smoke and Shadow”. The characters, both teachers at the local university, both humanities, don’t understand each other so well, they have few topics for conversation, but what will you do with this sudden love. Especially – if the yard is a long provincial winter. What you can’t invent under the howling of a snowstorm. (AST, edited by Elena Shubina, 2014)

Quote: “Love is a strange thing, it has a thousand faces. You can love anything and anyone; I once loved a bracelet in a shop window, too expensive to afford: after all, I had a family, children, I worked hard, burning my brain, to earn an apartment, a university education for children, I need I had to put it off for illness, for old age, for my mother’s hospital, for a sudden accident. I couldn’t buy a bracelet, I didn’t buy it, but I loved it, I thought about it as I fell asleep; I mourned and wept for him. Then it passed. He unclenched his pincers, squeezing my heart, he had mercy and let go. What difference does it make who he was? He could be a person, an animal, a thing, a cloud in the sky, a book, a line of other people’s poems, a southerly wind tearing the grass of the steppe, an episode from my dream, a street of a strange city turning a corner in the honey light of the setting sun, a passer-by’s smile, a sail on the blue a wave, a spring evening, a pear tree, a snatch of melody from someone else’s, random window.