The Quiet American

would you say is a book or a film that somebody can read or watch to get into the spirit the mood of vietnam before going out

it's a bit of an old-school recommendation but i would suggest reading the quiet american before coming or even while being in vietnam so written by graham green in the 50s it's a really interesting allegory for vietnam and its modern history there are three major characters a Brit, an American, and a Vietnamese.

The Brit reflects old colonialism, the American represents neo-colonialism or American colonialism, and then Vietnam reflects the colonized.

And the fascinating thing I think about the book is that even though it was written in the 50s, before officially the American involvement with the war, Graham Greene knew exactly what was going to happen.

Adam and his boy Aaron are the innocents, idealists, blithely and in many ways stupidly blind to the world around them, including sex and female desire, which they regard as impure.

This is the Western innocent of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, who plays the naive do-gooder while exploiting those around him.

linked to the idea of American purity and exceptionalism amidst a bloody history.

As Steinbeck describes it, Aaron didn't grow up.

But even these were done in pursuit of the higher ideal, seen as means justified by the end of making the world safe for freedom.

As the cynical British journalist says of the idealistic young American diplomat in Graham Greene's The Quiet American, I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.

It is painful to be an American and watch our leadership today and wonder if it stands for something quite different.

To listen as the President aligns himself with the successor to Stalin and Beria, to watch as he castigates a leader of a free ukraine fighting for its survival against a murderous tyranny to observe as he helps vladimir putin fuel his war machine so it can more effectively flatten hospitals and schools To hear that his White House might have restricted access to a vital technology for protecting innocent Ukrainians from incoming Russian hellfire? To see all this and realize that it isn't only Russia, but that the president's evident favor for Mr.

He framed entire episodes around the styles and themes of directors and writers, such as Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard, who we had a whole season on the road to Godard here.

And of course, we'll get into Wong Kar-wai, but he also had a deep literary background, so Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene in episodes like The Congo, which channels a lot of Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, or Hanoi, which references The Quiet American.

These references weren't a mere homage.

They were tools to interrogate Western and colonialist tropes and to unsettle the viewer's preconceived notion of a place.

Um, I hunted it down in a beautiful two-story bookshop that you would've loved in Hanoi.

It's The Quiet American by Graham Greene.

Now, I've, I've read several books by Graham Greene.

The ones I remember most, um, are the-

...

End of the Affair and, um, The Heart of the Matter, too.

But The Quiet American, I mean, if you're in Vietnam, it is just a perfect ...

And Anna from the op shop said, "See if you can read it before you go." Well, it was like reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil before I went to Savannah.

And I wanted to join this senior thesis class on post-colonialism and colonialism.

And I got myself into the class and I read Graham Greene's The Quiet American for the first time.

I'd been a fan of Graham Greene, actually, as this little boy growing up in San Jose, California.

I was reading this English novelist, reading The Power and the Glory, for example.

I hadn't read The Quiet American, however.

So I read it for the class and I realized, oh, this is obviously is about the Vietnam War from an Englishman's perspective.

It's obviously an excellent novel, technically, and was a hugely important novel for the Americans because many American readers felt that Graham Greene in 1955 had accurately forecast the tragedy of what the Americans would do.

Had you already read

I actually found it in Hanoi, and I read it over trains and on boats, and it is just a brilliant...

It, I think, um, uh, Ian McEwan called it my, my favorite ever novel.

And, um, you've studied it, you said.

Oh, well, I studied it in year 12, but, um, yeah, it was, uh, it was a, it was a joy to study.

So he wrote it in about 1955.

So the French colonialism is starting to, um, disintegrate, and the Americans are moving in.

And it is, this is a, a love triangle novel at, at its heart.

It is a story of a country at its heart and colonialism at its heart.

But you have to understand the psychology of the Americans.

Do you know the book, The Quiet American by Graham Greene? It's a fantastic novel about, uh, the Vietnam War, um, where, you know, the old, uh, European colonial powers, especially France, uh, they leave Vietnam, and then America steps in in the '50s, uh, impersonated, embodied by this young, dynamic American.

What does this American do? He takes the Vietnamese girlfriend from the English protagonist, who symbolizes, of course, the Old World.

That then the newcomer comes, and he takes away his girl, so the takeover of, uh, of the country impersonated by this, uh, woman, by this, by this girl.

Felt guilty about all the armed women he disappointed and the vodka martinis.

Those exploits would become grist for twenty-five lauded novels, including A Quiet American, The End of the Affair, The Beginning of Another Affair With Your Cousin, The Power and the Glory, and The Glory of Banging a Relative, Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right, But Three Aunts Do, and Fidel Castro Was a Hero to Most, But He Never Meant Mierda Para Mi.

It's the birthday of Groucho Marx, German philosopher who co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Freddie Mercury.

He had a special cast made of his nose and glasses that were handed out at socialist camps across Europe during the Great Banana Peel and Seltzer Decanter Wars of 1813-19.