5/12/2023 0 Comments The quiet american book reviewThe novel opens with the death of the eponymous American diplomat Pyle, and a series of flashbacks shows the difficult history of their relationship. Like Norman Lewis’ travel memoir Dragon Apparent, Greene eschews sentimentalisation, for the most part, again an unexpectedly refreshing take when one has become a little numbed by a lot of the insipid travel writing colliding around the web these days (we should know, we write some of it…) Greene, who was a correspondent himself in Vietnam from 1951 to 1954 and found inspiration in a real life American he once shared a ride with, writes from the perspective of Fowler, a jaded British foreign correspondent and long-time Saigon resident. The multi-layered, sparsely written novel set in the early 1950s remains a searing critique of the US meddling in the internal affairs of a nation and people it knows nothing about.
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