The Quiet American

The Quiet American 

by Graham Greene
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

GoodReads describes Greene as a writer whose "works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world." That is exactly what this novel, written in the mid-1950s does. The story is set in French Colonial Vietnam, apparently a bit before the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, and is the story of a British reporter and the small circle of people around him, "the Quiet American" is one of those people. There is a dry, distant tone taken by the narrators of the Greene novels I have read so far which works really well in describing the terrible things they are dealing with and the moral ambiguities with which they struggle at a personal level. 

If you are a person who can't deal with stories where bad things happen to dogs, this is not a book for you. I had planned to watch the 2002 movie based on this book, but my partner is one of those people re dogs, so that may not happen.

This title is on my Classics Club list. 

The Unquiet Englishman

The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene 

by Richard Greene
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The author of this excellent biography is a Canadian poet and scholar who teaches at the University of Toronto. 

Graham Greene is best known as a novelist, and this book discusses his various books and stories in detail. More interestingly, however, Greene was a journalist and associated with Britain's MI6. This took him to troubled places around the globe including Africa, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and South America. The part of this biography that I found most fascinating was the way the author wove background information on 20th century history into Greene's many travels and political involvements. 

This biography was also written in a very engaging style. The chapters are short and each is quite focused on a particular episode or issue which made this 500+ page book very quick reading. 
I am counting this book toward the Canadian Reading Challenge.

Six Degrees of Separation

The #6degrees meme is hosted at Books are my Favourite and Best. 

This month the chain begins with The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. I read this but I didn't like it as well as (1) Our Man in Havana which was the first Greene novel I had read. The next Graham Greene novel I plan to read is (2) The Quiet American. There is a movie version of this novel which stars Michael Caine. The book ended up on my TBR after I read (3) Blowing the Bloody Doors Off  which is Michael Caine's memoir. Another celebrity memoir I read recently was (4) Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes. Like the Caine book it was an entertaining combination of memoir and self-help. I don't read a lot of memoir, but I am a big fan of biography. I like the more objective point-of-view that a biographer brings to their subject. Robert Caro wrote a book called (5) Working which is a fascinating look behind the curtain at how this Pulitzer-prize-winning biographer creates his books. There are quite a few biographies on my TBR list, but one of the next ones I plan to read is (6) The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene by the Canadian poet and biographer Richard Thomas Greene.

Our Man in Havana

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Until now the mistake had seemed to Wormold fairly simple to deal with. But now it was as though he had tugged a stray piece of cotton and a whole suit had begun to unwind." (p. 137)

The question of what is real and what is imaginary and whether the difference matters is at the heart of this novel which tells the story of a vacuum cleaner salesman, Wormold,  turned British agent set in pre-Castro Cuba. The story is told from Wormold's point of view, which allows the reader to be see how he gets into the position he does by maintaining a belief that things can't really be as they seem, eventually someone will see how absurd it all is and put a stop to it. There are "interludes" where we see what is happening in London and realize that it is actually crazier than Wormold realizes. In places this book is funny, and it is full of interesting observances about human nature.

"A change will be good. When you feel unable to change your bar you have become old." (p.33)

I had not read anything by Greene before and plan to add some of his other books to my TBR list as I thoroughly enjoyed this one. This counts toward my 2016 Back to the Classics Challenge as a "classic which includes the name of a place in the title."