100 Years of Graham Greene · 228 words posted 10/02/2004 10:44 AM
Graham Greene, one of my favorite authors, was born 100 years ago today. The BBC has an excellent Centenary page with links to audio interviews.
Robert Girardi once called The Quiet American “a perfect novel.” I’m inclined to agree; it’s hard to believe that Greene wrote so presciently about the limits of the French colonial enterprise and the folly of American intervention in Southeast Asia fully ten years before the United States invaded Vietnam.
I’ve never been to Saigon, but I believe Mr. Greene captured the time and the place as well as anyone could have. Today, most street corners in the old quarter of Hanoi feature little kids hawking stacks of pirated copies: “Quiet American Mister! Quiet American!” Whether one reads it as a love story, a war adventure, or reportage, the Quiet American is one of the best short novels ever written.
He has fallen out of fashion these days: the left takes offense at his mid-century British sensibilities (shame on him for being a creature of his time), and biographers tell us he was a bore in his private life (as if that could have any bearing on how one reads his fiction). Fundamentally, though, Graham Greene had a keen eye for human frailty and a healthy suspicion of most of the isms that so plagued the 20th century.
Happy birthday, Mr. Greene, wherever you are.
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