Not my normal read, but a classic from the 1950s that I spotted in the hotel swap library. Dog-eared and well-read, my curiosity was piqued…
Graham Greene’s The Quiet American is a quietly haunting novel (also a movie) that explores the blurred lines between morality, politics, and love in 1950s Vietnam. Seen through the jaded eyes of Fowler, a British journalist, it captures the unease of a fading empire and the unsettling rise of American idealism.
A lot of people took this book to be a sharp critique of the kind of naive optimism that would later define much of America’s involvement during the Vietnam War.
It really is a classic in all regards.