![]() ![]() At first glance, it seems like just a funny espionage thriller (seems like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?). He is set to report on economic and military goings-on in Cuba, and begins concocting wild reports based on Tales from Shakespeare by Charles Lamb and dreaming up military installations from vacuum designs. Wormold is a vacuum-cleaner salesman in Havana, when he is randomly recruited by Hawthorne, a British secret agent. ![]() There’s lots of whimsy in this one, and the whole plot is completely ludicrous. ![]() I believe Our Man in Havana is an entertainment, and it certainly shows. As Christopher Hitchens mentions in his introduction, Greene divided his books into “novels” and “entertainments”. He has that talent for being really hilarious at one time, and at the next, super sad. I really love Graham Greene’s witty and sardonic writing. ![]() On Wormold’s death-bed, when Dr Hasselbacher came to feel his failing pulse, he would perhaps become Jim. ‘That n***er going down the street,’ said Dr Hasselbacher standing in the Wonder Bar, ‘he reminds me of you, Mr Wormold.’ It was typical of Dr Hasselbacher that after fifteen years of friendship he still used the prefix Mr- friendship proceeded with the slowness and assurance of a careful diagnosis. ![]()
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