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Product Reviews:
Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) |
Rating: 5 (out of 5)
Summary: Wonderful fun ...
Comments: Start to finish ... this is a classic. you will laugh out loud ... and never look at vacuum cleaners the same way again.
READ it Amici ... READ ... |
Rating: 4 (out of 5)
Summary: Never underestimate the power of a vacuum cleaner
Comments: Our Man in Havana, published in 1958 just months before Castro's coup, captures the earlier Cold War years in a Havana that was a pit of intrigue though the unanswerable questions of who is an agent and who isn't, and to what recognizable side does anyone belong make it comic and dangerous at the same time. This is the story of an expat Brit in Havana, a vacuum cleaner salesman who has no real allegiance to politics of any stripe however who allows himself to be recruited to spy for the mother country since, as a single parent with a high maintenance teenage daughter, he's got bills to pay.
The1thing Jim Wormold rightly assesses is, no1knows what is really going on. The directions from the home office are so vague that it is easy enough to invent agents and reports and not get caught, even when the home office sends the lovely agent Beatrice to pose as his secretary. It does not take long, though, for his deceptions to be purchased up as truth, which multiplies the absurd intrigues and pushes him into the sinister heart of a place where a local police captain who lusts after Wormold's daughter coolly delivers a scary appraisal of who belongs to the "torturable" and "untorturable" classes. The ending is funny however there are some tragedies leading up to it, the collateral damage of operating in the vortex of the world's political and moral ambiguities. Our Man in Havana is a run up of sorts to Greene's later novel The Human Factor, in which nothing is funny at all however the same question is asked of both protagonists: what do you put 1st, family or country?
Christopher Hitchens supplies a decent critical introduction to the Penguin edition and like all critical introductions it is pocked with spoilers, so read it as an afterward. He puts the novel in context with Greene's life and literary themes. Our Man in Havana was out there, complete with an agent number assigned by the home office, before James Bond and before George Smiley. With the Cold War robbed of its meaning after the Berlin Wall came down, and with intelligence mangled by political ambitions in the early 21st century, it is interesting to see that these stalwarts of the spy genre still have something with which to amuse or soberly ponder the world.
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Rating: 5 (out of 5)
Summary: Great Book
Comments: funny, however at the same time poignant and examines the emotions of the characters pretty well. |
Rating: 4 (out of 5)
Summary: Greene at his almost all Optimistic
Comments: This is the fifth Graham Greene novel I have read, and the 1st with an even moderately happy ending. A pseudo-spy novel with a pseudo-spy named Wormold, the book is more a meditation on where human allegiance should really be when government and family seem at odds with each other. It's also a fairly quick read (for Greene) that's funny as hell. |
Rating: 3 (out of 5)
Summary: Disappointed
Comments: I read a lot of Graham Greene, and this is the1one of his works that disappointed. Characters were dull and the plot, slow to develop. Also, the technology described seemed dated in view of today's world. |
