The Quiet American

Locations
Call Number: Fiction / Greene, Graham, Adult Book / Fiction / Classic / Greene, Graham
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Malletts Creek Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Greene, Graham	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Greene, Graham	4-week checkout	Due 05-16-2024
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Classic / Greene, Graham	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"First published ... by William Heinemann Ltd 1955 ... This edition ... published in Penguin Books (U.S.A.) 2004"--Title page verso.
This novel is a study of New World hope and innocence set in an Old World of violence. The scene is Saigon in the violent years when the French were desperately trying to hold their footing in the Far East. The principal characters are a skeptical British journalist, his attractive Vietnamese mistress, and an eager young American sent out by Washington on a mysterious mission.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Library Journal Review
Summary / Annotation
Table of Contents
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

It's a good time to read this. submitted by globesky on August 23, 2018, 7:52pm This book details a collision of ideals, politics, and personalities of two foreigners in a violently changing landscape. Greene does a really amazing job of juxtaposing cynicism and optimism. It's beautiful. Many available comparisons to America's recent involvement abroad.

Prescient but Virulently Racist and Sexist submitted by Meginator on August 31, 2019, 11:26pm I alternated between two moods while reading this: utter boredom and visceral disgust. Graham Greene may do an excellent job of predicting the ultimate results of U.S. intervention in Vietnam in this novel, but he ultimately falls into the same patterns of thought that he thinks he’s satirizing here; he is, in the end, not so different than his “Quiet American”. Most appalling is his treatment of the book’s central female character, a Vietnamese woman who exists solely as a point of conflict for the two white male leads: for all of their crowing about their respect for her, they (and the author, too) sure don’t seem to recognize that she has her own personality or, heaven forbid, even a shred of agency over the course of her own life. I’m tired of this. You’re tired of this. I don’t care when the book was written: it’s uninteresting, it’s insulting, and it’s inhumane, especially given the context.

The same goes for other Vietnamese characters, who appear as faceless servants/waiters, soldiers, or victims while the white men around them debate what’s best for them (in one notable instance, the two male leads have a heated intellectual debate about Western imperialist intervention while under fire in a watchtower with two Vietnamese combatants). Not only is the book’s moral core deeply suspect, but the book itself offers uninteresting protagonists and a slow, disjointed plot that requires the reader to care about bland men with an inflated sense of self-importance; when this isn’t actively disgusting, it’s just plain boring. Given its prescience, I think that Greene’s intention was to criticize these patterns of behavior, and while he’s certainly not wrong, his breathtaking lack of self-awareness easily matches the inflated ego he supplies to the book’s supposed villain. Approach this one with a healthy sense of irony or, better yet, ignore it entirely.

Great novel with modern day relevance, appealing human observations submitted by sVfGI7Glt2pz7GZgVB90 on July 9, 2020, 1:19pm A master of uneasy consciences reveals a compact tale of the British, American, and Asian empires woven around three alienated lovers. Although it's set in Vietnam, this is the book to read to understand the latest news from a troubled place, or just to know why humans feel longing---perhaps homesick---for far-flung places and betray the people they love. Insightful, however Cynical.