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Carregando... Our Man in Havana (1958)de Graham Greene
  
20th Century Literature (102) 1950s (17) » 17 mais Favourite Books (417) Top Five Books of 2013 (335) Top Five Books of 2015 (120) Books Read in 2019 (612) Nifty Fifties (21) Read This Next (19) SHOULD Read Books! (107) Latin America (83) Best Satire (50) Books Set on Islands (74) Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.  caflores | Feb 12, 2021 |  Starts out pretty slow, but ends up being eerie, funny, and surprisingly affecting. Sometimes it seems like Greene is speaking a little too hard through his characters, but ultimately I'm glad that I took the time for this one. A little treat of a spy story. (  ) skolastic | Feb 2, 2021 | James Wormold, a vacuum cleaner seller, is recruited to be a spy for M16. Since Wormold does not make enough money, he accepts the offer in espionage. Since there is nothing to report to England, he fabricates reports using newspaper articles. He also fakes a spy ring in order to receive more money. His crowning achievement is sending drawings of a secret military site which turns out to be enlarged drawings of vacuum cleaner parts. He tries to cover his tracks by killing off some of his fake spies. The story takes a turn when his spies, some of whom are named after real people in Havana, are killed. Graham Greene is worth the read because of his astute descriptions of his characters. Such as “'Never. Never.’ Her voice had the lingering resonance of Poe’s Raven.” ( ) Pharmacdon | Dec 20, 2020 | Y-4  Murtra | Oct 2, 2020 | I think Graham Greene is at his best when he is darkly satirical, I have found it hard to struggle through his more crisis of faith serious novels. This one is brilliant, it strikes a perfect balance of the absurd and serious. I realized that I had read several other books over the years (and at least one TV series) that owed huge debts to this novel. amyem58 | Sep 14, 2020 |
 10 of the Greatest Cold War Spy Novels “Possibly the greatest writer of prose to devote so much of his time to the theme of espionage, Greene was himself briefly an intelligence agent. His WW 2 experiences in London, dealing with a disinformation-dealing agent in Portugal, provided the impetus for this satirical and prescient look at the spy game. Wormhold, a British vacuum salesman in Havana during the Batista regime, becomes a spy for the MI6 to better provide for his daughter (he’s a single parent). The reports Wormhold concocts involve imaginary agents, whose salaries he collects. But his lively reports begin to greatly interest London, who send in reinforcements, initiating a deadly black comedy of errors, making the hapless agent a Soviet target. In an instance of perfect casting, Alec Guinness portrayed Wormhold in the 1959 film version.” Toward the end, as we go into a business luncheon at which Wormold is due to die, things begin to warm, and it seems we will get what we came for. But when, for a climax, a dog wanders into the dining room, laps the whisky Wormold spilled, dies, and thus gives warning of poison, things simply fall apart. I never saw a dog drink hard liquor, and don't believe this one did. However, I do believe he could read, and had had a look at the script, to know what he should do. All in all, little as a Greene fan likes to say it, this book misses, and in a thoroughly heartbreaking way, for it misses needlessly where it might have rung the bell. For once, Greene's Roman Catholic hang-ups, which make novels such as The End of the Affair so desolate, are kept in check - even joked about. "Hail Mary, quite contrary", prays convent-educated Milly, aged four. Nine years later she sets fire to a small American boy called Thomas Earl Parkman Junior because he's a Protestant - "and if there was going to be a persecution, Catholics could always beat Protestants at that game." Pertence à série publicadaBiblioteca Folha (20) — 7 mais
James Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman in a city of power cuts, is short on money and has a teenage daughter with expensive tastes. When he's approached by the MI-6 to become an agent, he reluctantly takes the lucrative job and soon begins fabricating wild reports, inventing bogus recruits, and dreaming up secret military constructions out of vacuum cleaner designs. But his deceptions soon start becoming disturbingly real. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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El planteamiento de la trama, desde luego, es propicio al humor y a las situaciones divertidas, y Greene lo mezcla muy sabiamente con momentos tensos y también trágicos. Pero lo que más me ha atraído es su interés por el aspecto humano de sus personajes. No en vano "El factor humano" es una de sus novelas más famosas. Bien está la crítica a los sistemas políticos que se gastan el dinero en auténticas chapuzas, pero lo realmente importante son las sensaciones del protagonista que determinan sus actuaciones: necesita dinero para atender a su hija, tiene miedo de que le despidan y luego de que lo maten, quiere a su amigo y luego se enamora (no del amigo, sino de una chica, que tampoco es cuestión de destripar el argumento), envidia a los que viven mejor que él, etc. Todo eso pasa por su interior y es, en el fondo, lo que le impulsa a actuar de tal manera que casi provoca un incidente internacional. Veladamente, Greene deja sospechar que la mayor parte de los agentes secretos son iguales. A lo mejor, hasta es verdad. (