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Around the World in Books / Vietnam
When Love and War Were Both Hell
Cross-cultural romance plays out amid disaster in Vietnam
This is the 27th post in the “Around the World in Books” series that is reviewing 30 books about 30 countries in 30 days in March. Tomorrow: Wales
“Great wars produce great novels,” critics like to say — but bad wars can also produce good books. A classic example is Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.
Greene covered the war in Vietnam for The Times of London, and that work inspired this 1955 novel. The Quiet American involves a love triangle that plays out during the French hot war and the American Cold War in Indochina in the early 1950s, and the book appears both on lists of the “best war novels” and “best Cold War novels.” Either way, it deserves its acclaim.
The Quiet American is a scathing — and extraordinarily prescient — indictment of the many ways the United States went wrong in Southeast Asia.
Love as a metaphor for American imperialism
Thomas Fowler, a jaded Saigon-based British reporter in his 50s, is in love with a Vietnamese woman, Phuong, as is Alden Pyle, a young CIA agent. You can read Pyle’s hapless courtship of Phuong as a metaphor for…
