The Quiet American

I saw the film version of The Quiet American years ago.  As a result, I had Michael Caine's voice in my head for the entirety of the book.  Even in my mind, my Michael Caine impreasion is shit, so it actually ended up being pretty distracting.  Despite all of this, it's a pretty good read.

Graham Greene's novel tells the story of Fowler, a cynical British reporter, and the death of his friend Pyle, your standard wided eyed young American in over his head in Vietnam after World War Two. Told throguh flashbacks, the pair naturally both fall in love with the same woman but somehow maintain their friendship. Their political differences are slightly more troubling and ultimately lead to Pyle's murder- Fowler's possible involvement in which forms part of the narrative.

The political situation is interesting, my knowledge of Vietnamese history and limited to the one war- which is clearly being built up to in the novel.  I won't go into it too much, as my understanding of it all is almost certainly faulty. But it's always nice to see the death of American idealism. Greene juxtaposes this with Fowler's cynicism so the reader sees the whole situation to be as futile as he does.

I think part of the reason that I enjoyed The Quiet American is that is plays up to so many tropes. None of the characters are believable as humans because they are such stereotypes- Fowler is the man who has seen too much and trusts nobody but himself, Pyle is has the certainty of youth and believes he will save the country. Even if the book didn't start with Pyle dying it would be so clear what would happen to his character.  And then there is Phuong. She is a screen that the two men project their desires onto- for Fowler this is sex and a reprieve from loneliness and for Pyle it is the American Dream.

This isn't Greene's best book, but it is a good one. He is one of those authors who, while usually good, occasionally transcends into beauty. The moment in The Quiet American is just a sentence after a bombing in a market place- "Suffering is not increased by numbers: one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel."

Ignorance

I haven't read anything by Milan Kundera for years.  I loved him when I was about seventeen and have read pretty much everything by him.  In my youth, studying the philosophy of morality I really connected with his work.  As a result, Ignorance is the only one of his books on The List that I have left to read.  And I remember now why I like him so much.

Ignorance tells the story of two people who abandoned their Czech homeland in the years of Communism.  Following its fall in 1989 they both come back for the first time in twenty years.  The pair, Irena and Josef, meet by chance in a Parisian airport and, each sort of remembering the other, decide to get together while in Prague.  The book is actually remarkably dense for something that is fewer than 200 pages long- as well as their respective visits home, Kundera details Irena and Josef's memories of other.

The story is pretty simple, for all that's packed in there and Kundera is even kind enough to provide a brief history of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic (including why the number twenty is so important in the country's 20th Century history) for those of us who only have a vague concept of the Eastern Bloc and zero memories pre-1989.  Kundera then gors on to use said simple story as a way of exploring the concept of memory.  Irena's memories of her time with Josef are different to Josef's memories of his time with Irena.  This fact shapes their present day interactions.  It's difficult to explain without just giving the whole plot away or over-simplifying Kundera's points to an inane redundancy, but it's good. I enjoyed it.

Ironically, given my fond memories of Kundera, he also touches on the importance of nostalgia.  Nostalgia, Kundera tells us, comes from two Greek words- 'nostros' which means 'return' and 'algos'- 'suffering.'  Nostalgia is literally "suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return."  He ties this all into the idea of emigration and language- each of the European languages have subtle differences in their words for the same concept.  The etymology of these various languages means that Irena especially is left living in Paris with a feeling of longing that we are told cannot be expressed fully in French.  Again, it's such a complex idea and, after telling us off of this, Kundera weaves the idea of nostalgia into the rest of the story.  He uses it to explain why both Irena and Josef decided to return to the Czech Republic and why Josef finds it impossible to stay.

As I said, there's a lot in Ignorance.  It's one of the few books that I've enjoyed that made me wish I were better read.  There are frequent references to the Odyssey- again showing the significance of twenty years- that I know I don't grasp the nuances of.  It also makes me wish I were better travelled; having lived in just two places in my entire life, emigration and the feelings associated with it are a difficult concept.  Mostly, though, this book just made me nostalgic for my education.