szilvus::..::.... » February, 2005

February, 2005

At Tuesday, February 22, 2005 02:54:48 PM, by szilvus

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Yesterday I was checking out Mei's webpage, and suddenly I decided that from now on I will sometimes write about books as well. Petit reviews. So here's the first one.

Graham Greene: The Quiet American

I must admit it was not the first time I read this book. A very long time ago when I was around 12 I read it in Hungarian. I read a lot at that time. And I read quite many books earlier than others usually do. This was the case with The Quiet American (T.Q.A.) as well. I used to go into my parents bedroom where there were two huge wardrobes full of books and pick whatever looked nice... it was my very own small library at that time. Full of Hemingway, Remarque, Greene, Keruac, etc. I remember our copy of T.Q.A. was white from the outside and there was a photo of a young soldier wearing a tin hat or battle bowler or whatever these helmets are called that protect the skull of soldiers from wounds.... This time I read the book in English, I like reading stuff in original language. Although Hungarian translations are sometimes even better than the original as our language is extremely expressive, so we have far more words than the Enlgish language for instance. The plot takes place in Indo-China somewhere around the early fifties. I don't wanna tell the story but it is about two men. One from the US of A, a young idealistic and naive man. The other from Britain, a man in his fifties, ripe, cynical about war and love. And their lives meet, and the conflict s the clash of their ideas... but probably I am not the best person to paraphrase something that was so well written by Greene, a superb novelist. But here's a little extract from it:

He turned to Phuong and interrogated her sharply in French. ‘How long have you lived with Monsieur Pyle?’
‘A month—I don’t know,’ she said.
‘How much has he paid you?’
‘You’ve no right to ask her that,’ I said. ‘She’s not for sale.’
‘She used to live with you, didn’t she?’ he asked abruptly. ‘For two years.’
‘I’m a correspondent who’s supposed to report your war— when you let him. Don’t ask me to contribute to your scandal sheet as well.’
‘What do you know about Pyle? Please answer my questions, Monsieur Fowler. I don’t want to ask them. But this is serious. Please believe me it is very serious.’
‘I’m not an informer. You know all I can tell you about Pyle. Age thirty-two, employed in the Economic Aid Mission, nationality American.’
‘You sound like a friend of his,’ Vigot said, looking past me at Phuong. A native policeman came in with three cups of black coffee.
‘Or would you rather have tea?’ Vigot asked.
‘I am a friend,’ I said. ‘Why not? I shall be going home one day, won’t I? I can’t take her with me. She’ll be all right with him. It’s a reasonable arrangement. And he’s going to marry her, he says. He might, you know. He’s a good chap in his way. Serious. Not one of those noisy bastards at the Continental. A quiet American,’ I summed him precisely up as I might have said, ‘a blue lizard,’ ‘a white elephant.’
Vigot said, ‘Yes.’ He seemed to be looking for words on his desk with which to convey his meaning as precisely as I had done. ‘A very quiet American.’ He sat there in the little hot office waiting for one of us to speak. A mosquito droned to the attack and I watched Phuong. Opium makes you quick-witted—perhaps only because it calms the nerves and stills the emotions. Nothing, not even death, seems so important. Phuong, I thought, had not caught his tone, melancholy and final, and her English was very bad. While she sat there on the hard office-chair, she was still waiting patiently for Pyle. I had at that moment given up waiting, and I could see Vigot taking those two facts in.
‘How did you meet him first?’ Vigot asked me.
Why should I explain to him that it was Pyle who had met me? I had seen him last September coming across the square towards the bar of the Continental: an unmistakably young and unused face flung at us like a dart. With his gangly legs and his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze he seemed incapable of harm. The tables on the street were most of them full. ‘Do you mind?’ he had asked with serious courtesy. ‘My name’s Pyle. I’m new here,’ and he had folded himself around a chair and ordered a beer. Then he looked quickly up into the hard noon glare.

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