The Quiet American by Graham Greene
Oct. 5th, 2004 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zalenaThe Quiet American by Graham Greene
I finished The Quiet American last night. I’ve been thinking about reading Greene for a long time and finally got around to it when a friend recommended it to me. This book has been sitting around since the beginning of August. I needed a break from kiddie lit, and it seemed like it would be appropriately somber.
The book is about a British war correspondent in early-conflict Vietnam. (The book was written in 1955) who encounters a young gung-ho American, who believes the solution to Vietnam’s problems is to introduce a “Third Party” to the conflict and therefore liberating the Vietnamese in the name of democracy and free trade.
Sound like any conflict we in which we are currently engaged?
This book was a revelation to me, mostly in terms of Vietnam, how we got into the morass, and what the heck was going on before our arrival on the scene. However, the book is not really political. As the author is Graham Greene it includes adultery, Catholicism, and the moral obligation of the individual being engaged in the world around one.
It is a very focused and straightforward book. There’s a lot we never find out about the political situation in the country, or any of the character pasts. We know the reporter, Fowler, has an estranged wife who will not divorce him, and an estranged lover for whom he grieves. The reasons why these persons are estranged is never truly made clear, it simply isn’t a relevant detail to the story. He has a Vietnamese mistress in whom the “quiet American” becomes interested.
As everything is filtered through the point of view of the reporter, nothing about the other characters is entirely to be trusted. And yet the narrator seems reliable, and the style tends to be detached and reportorial. Even many of the existential ideas are conveyed through conversations, rather than through the interior monologue of the reporter.
This is a good book, thought I can’t say it will withstand the onslaught of the 21C. It would be an excellent text for any political science class, and it is not necessary that you know anything about Vietnam before reading it. The book could be set in an imaginary country and be just as relevant. It has led me to further thought on the subject of democracy, whether or not it is something that can be exported or should be exported. I love my country and believe in its ideals, but for the most part, our experiments with exporting democracy have led to its’ siblings, Revolution and Civil War, and not always to the benefit of the persons living in those countries.
One of the things I appreciated most about the book was its limited scope. Everything is on a level of first person observable experience. We know there is a vast war going on, but what really matters, both in the book, and as a part of Greene’s argument for personal responsibility, is what happens within our personal sphere of interest. The ending has an element that is both uncomfortable and ambiguous as far as the role Fowler (the reporter) has in events that overtake the Pyle (the “quiet American”). I think this is intentional on the part of the author. It was disturbing, thought provoking, and satisfying at the same time. Literature should be so.
Now that I’ve finished it, I want to know what other people have to say. I want to know why my friend decided to recommend it to me, what he got out of the book, and whether his being Catholic alters his viewpoint any. It’s hard to read a book someone has recommended to one without trying to read it through his eyes. This same friend gave me W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, and was the first person to recommend Milan Kundera in high school.
The Razor’s Edge was a mystery to me at the time. I was in love with books like Dorian Grey, and it was one of my first forays into grownup literary realism. The story, which deals loosely with a character who travels the world in search of spiritual enlightenment, focuses mainly around the characters who are left behind, including a female love interest. I found this book upsetting on a number of levels at the time, not the least of which was that I was trying to decode some secret message my friend was giving me by sending me the book. There was a sort of sanctimonious attitude on behalf of the author and the adventurer, like this woman had chosen some inferior life. It seemed obvious to me that she was painfully in love with the protagonist, but at a loss of what to do if he didn’t plan to share his life with her. He kept popping up at inconvenient times. A treatment of a similar relationship on more sympathetic terms would be the relationship in Mrs. Dalloway between Mrs. Dalloway and her beau who’d vanished to India.
Of course, at the time, I felt like my friend was telling me that he was the adventurer and I the pathetic stay-at-home girl. To this day I think I am missing something when it comes to this book, and may very well have to reread it. I have a sneaking suspicion that this book is in fact NOT about the spirituality of world travel vs. the numbing materialism of staying at home. Instead it is quite possibly about how people act out the damage they received as a result of the First World War, and how this damage, and other world events, play out in their lives.
As for Unbearable Lightness, a frequently misunderstood book, which I could go on about at some length as to why I dislike, I also saw my friend identifying with Tomas, leaving me to be either the faithful, puppy-loyal Tereza, or the promiscuous, but equally self-deprecating Sabina. I now understand that I, like most persons, read this book too young, and it might mean something different as a person with more experience, but I am still irritated that the women aren’t given a larger, more complicated role. As I recall, Razor’s Edge also had the one loyal, well behaved, woman, and the other promiscuous. Maybe I should reread them both, though in both cases I recall the male characters to be more complex.
Thankfully, I am no longer trying to decode secret messages from the books he gives me, nor trying to identify with any of the characters. (The only female character of any significance in The Quiet American is Phuong, the Vietnamese mistress, who is more of an object or a nationality than a character, something along with the attitudes about which that make this book a mite offensive.) I do still wonder what he sees in them. Is the reporter’s sense of religion, mortality, and morality something that informs his life?
I suppose we should have a chat about the book and maybe I will have a chance to find out.
S
I finished The Quiet American last night. I’ve been thinking about reading Greene for a long time and finally got around to it when a friend recommended it to me. This book has been sitting around since the beginning of August. I needed a break from kiddie lit, and it seemed like it would be appropriately somber.
The book is about a British war correspondent in early-conflict Vietnam. (The book was written in 1955) who encounters a young gung-ho American, who believes the solution to Vietnam’s problems is to introduce a “Third Party” to the conflict and therefore liberating the Vietnamese in the name of democracy and free trade.
Sound like any conflict we in which we are currently engaged?
This book was a revelation to me, mostly in terms of Vietnam, how we got into the morass, and what the heck was going on before our arrival on the scene. However, the book is not really political. As the author is Graham Greene it includes adultery, Catholicism, and the moral obligation of the individual being engaged in the world around one.
It is a very focused and straightforward book. There’s a lot we never find out about the political situation in the country, or any of the character pasts. We know the reporter, Fowler, has an estranged wife who will not divorce him, and an estranged lover for whom he grieves. The reasons why these persons are estranged is never truly made clear, it simply isn’t a relevant detail to the story. He has a Vietnamese mistress in whom the “quiet American” becomes interested.
As everything is filtered through the point of view of the reporter, nothing about the other characters is entirely to be trusted. And yet the narrator seems reliable, and the style tends to be detached and reportorial. Even many of the existential ideas are conveyed through conversations, rather than through the interior monologue of the reporter.
This is a good book, thought I can’t say it will withstand the onslaught of the 21C. It would be an excellent text for any political science class, and it is not necessary that you know anything about Vietnam before reading it. The book could be set in an imaginary country and be just as relevant. It has led me to further thought on the subject of democracy, whether or not it is something that can be exported or should be exported. I love my country and believe in its ideals, but for the most part, our experiments with exporting democracy have led to its’ siblings, Revolution and Civil War, and not always to the benefit of the persons living in those countries.
One of the things I appreciated most about the book was its limited scope. Everything is on a level of first person observable experience. We know there is a vast war going on, but what really matters, both in the book, and as a part of Greene’s argument for personal responsibility, is what happens within our personal sphere of interest. The ending has an element that is both uncomfortable and ambiguous as far as the role Fowler (the reporter) has in events that overtake the Pyle (the “quiet American”). I think this is intentional on the part of the author. It was disturbing, thought provoking, and satisfying at the same time. Literature should be so.
Now that I’ve finished it, I want to know what other people have to say. I want to know why my friend decided to recommend it to me, what he got out of the book, and whether his being Catholic alters his viewpoint any. It’s hard to read a book someone has recommended to one without trying to read it through his eyes. This same friend gave me W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, and was the first person to recommend Milan Kundera in high school.
The Razor’s Edge was a mystery to me at the time. I was in love with books like Dorian Grey, and it was one of my first forays into grownup literary realism. The story, which deals loosely with a character who travels the world in search of spiritual enlightenment, focuses mainly around the characters who are left behind, including a female love interest. I found this book upsetting on a number of levels at the time, not the least of which was that I was trying to decode some secret message my friend was giving me by sending me the book. There was a sort of sanctimonious attitude on behalf of the author and the adventurer, like this woman had chosen some inferior life. It seemed obvious to me that she was painfully in love with the protagonist, but at a loss of what to do if he didn’t plan to share his life with her. He kept popping up at inconvenient times. A treatment of a similar relationship on more sympathetic terms would be the relationship in Mrs. Dalloway between Mrs. Dalloway and her beau who’d vanished to India.
Of course, at the time, I felt like my friend was telling me that he was the adventurer and I the pathetic stay-at-home girl. To this day I think I am missing something when it comes to this book, and may very well have to reread it. I have a sneaking suspicion that this book is in fact NOT about the spirituality of world travel vs. the numbing materialism of staying at home. Instead it is quite possibly about how people act out the damage they received as a result of the First World War, and how this damage, and other world events, play out in their lives.
As for Unbearable Lightness, a frequently misunderstood book, which I could go on about at some length as to why I dislike, I also saw my friend identifying with Tomas, leaving me to be either the faithful, puppy-loyal Tereza, or the promiscuous, but equally self-deprecating Sabina. I now understand that I, like most persons, read this book too young, and it might mean something different as a person with more experience, but I am still irritated that the women aren’t given a larger, more complicated role. As I recall, Razor’s Edge also had the one loyal, well behaved, woman, and the other promiscuous. Maybe I should reread them both, though in both cases I recall the male characters to be more complex.
Thankfully, I am no longer trying to decode secret messages from the books he gives me, nor trying to identify with any of the characters. (The only female character of any significance in The Quiet American is Phuong, the Vietnamese mistress, who is more of an object or a nationality than a character, something along with the attitudes about which that make this book a mite offensive.) I do still wonder what he sees in them. Is the reporter’s sense of religion, mortality, and morality something that informs his life?
I suppose we should have a chat about the book and maybe I will have a chance to find out.
S
