Greene described this book as an "entertainment." In the early comedic parts I thought that Greene, at least in this instance, had indeed produced a lightweight entertaining novel and was not the heavyweight literature writer I had been lead to believe he was. I was thinking that I would not greatly inclined to read anything else by a writer many feel was robbed of the Nobel Prize.

When the book suddenly and dramatically veers towards the Tragic at about the half-way point my feelings also began to change. The characters steadily developed greater depth and a clear message emerged. The pace and rate of incident increased and a genuine sense of fear for the protagonist grew in me. I found the ending particularly satisfying, though explaining why would introduce plot spoilers....Having finished I am keen to read more by Greene.

I can’t remember the last time I laughed out loud when reading a book. This story of a British vacuum cleaner salesman recruited to be a spy in Cuba at the height of the Cold War was clever, smart, funny and totally entertaining. I don’t think I will ever hear a report from any intelligence agency the same way again.

Βαθμολογία: 9/10

Αυτή είναι η δεύτερη φορά που διαβάζω το συγκεκριμένο βιβλίο, με την πρώτη να είναι τον Απρίλιο του 2011, δηλαδή πριν καν γίνω είκοσι χρονών και αποκτήσω την εμπειρία σαν αναγνώστης που έχω τώρα. Και, μάλιστα, το διάβασα σε μια μετάφραση της δεκαετίας του '50 (η έκδοση είναι του 1959), που ήταν καλούτσικη μεν, σίγουρα παλιομοδίτικη και παρωχημένη δε. Τώρα όμως διάβασα τη μετάφραση των εκδόσεων Πόλις, και πραγματικά το απόλαυσα. Ασυζητητί, είναι από τις σπουδαίες στιγμές του μεγάλου αυτού συγγραφέα, και κατά τη γνώμη μου από τα καλύτερα και εξυπνότερα κωμικά μυθιστορήματα της Αγγλικής λογοτεχνίας. Ουσιαστικά ο Γκριν σατιρίζει τον κόσμο των μυστικών υπηρεσιών και των κατασκόπων, με την πλοκή πάντως να είναι σοβαρή και όχι γραφική ή φτηνή, και τους χαρακτήρες να είναι καλοδουλεμένοι και σίγουρα όχι καρτουνίστικοι. Είπαμε, ο Γκράχαμ Γκριν είναι (ήταν δηλαδή) ένας συγγραφέας ποιότητας, ακόμα και στις πιο ανάλαφρες στιγμές του προσφέρει ποιότητα και τροφή για σκέψη, ενδιαφέρουσες πλοκές και χαρακτήρες με βάθος. Η γραφή του είναι πραγματικά εξαίσια, με ολοζώντανους διαλόγους και με περιγραφές που σε μεταφέρουν με περισσή ευκολία στην Αβάνα της δεκαετίας του '50, ενώ το χιούμορ ευφυές, διακριτικό και σε σημεία αιχμηρό. Χωρίς καμία αμφιβολία, είναι ένα μυθιστόρημα που οι λάτρεις της καλής λογοτεχνίας θα το απολαύσουν, ειδικά αν λατρεύουν τα κατασκοπευτικά μυθιστορήματα και θέλουν να διαβάσουν μια πανέξυπνη παρωδία που αναδεικνύει τα κακώς κείμενα του κόσμου των μυστικών υπηρεσιών, αλλά και του Ψυχρού Πολέμου. Αυτή τη φορά θα του βάλω πέντε αστεράκια στο Goodreads.

I read this several years ago - and enjoyed it immensely, but what struck this time round was how much I missed on the first reading. Laugh-out-loud reading pleasure this time. Greene calls the novel An Entertainment - which I think, partly was his way of avoiding criticism of his "criticisms" of the British secret service.

Anyway the story is straightforward - Jim Wormold is a vacuum cleaner sales rep based in Havanna, Cuba - set towards the end of Batista's regime - so before 1959.

Wormold is recruited as a secret services agent - reluctantly and only because funds are low. He is concerned about 17 year old Milly, his daughter - who has expensive tastes and is attracting the attentions of the wrong kind of suitor - Captain Segura, the local police chief also known as the Red Vulture. Wormold wants to send Milly to finishing school in Switzerland.

Wormold's character is clearly drawn in various ways from our author - in that he has good creative skills and quickly invents several sub-agents - based loosely on people he has observed in Havanna. He uses their names but invents skills and reports which are sent to HQ in London.

The story is humorous, but at the same time provides a wry commentary on the Cold War activities of British, Russian and American agents.

Wormold's old friend Dr Hasselbacher was once an Uhlan officer - think Prussia, Kaiser pre WWI - and is subsequently recruited by the Germans - because he is good at acrostics - crossword puzzles. And is able to decode Wormold's messages - for which he uses a specific edition of Charles Lambs' Tales of Shakespeare.

Here's a short extract - to get you hooked. London have sent an assistant, Beatrice and a radio operator, Rudy.

Now that Beatrice was here, Wormold had a great deal more to worry about than his Saturday evening exercises. There was not only the basic training which Beatrice insisted on giving in microphotography, there were also the cables he had to think up to keep Rudy happy and the more cables Wormold sent the more he received. Every week now London bothered him for photographs of the installations in Oriente, and every week Beatrice became more impatient to take over the contact with his agents. It was against all the rules, she told him, for the head of the station to meet his own sources. Once he took her to dinner at the Country Club and, as bad luck would have it, Engineer Cifuentes was paged. A very tall lean man with a squint rose from a table near-by.
'Is that Cifuentes?' Beatrice asked sharply.
'Yes.'
'But you told me he was sixty-five.'
'He looks young for his age.'
'And you said he had a paunch.'
'Not paunch - ponch. It's the local dialect for squint.' It was a very narrow squeak.
After that she began to interest herself in a more romantic figure of Wormold's imagination - . . .

Wormold eventually confesses to Beatrice - because he's in love with her.

And so, if you've not read this - no more spoilers - you're in for a treat.

اولین رمانی بود که از گراهام گرین خواندم. قلم گرین به حدی برایم شیرین بود که رفتم و کتابهای دیگرش را سرچ کردم تا در صف خواندن قرار بدهم.
مامور ما در هاوانا داستان یک شهروند معمولی انگلیسی به نام ورمولد در کوبا است. سازمان جاسوسی انگلیس از ورمولد میخواهد که برای آنها جاسوسی کند. ورمولد با استفاده از تخیل قوی خود، وانمود میکند که در هاوانا تعدادی مامور استخدام کرده و اطلاعات جمع آوری میکند و به این ترتیب دستگاه جاسوسی انگلیس را به اشتباه می اندازد. کتاب دارای رگه های طنز است و درونمایه ای ضد جنگ دارد. این رمان بسیار مرا به یاد یکی از پادکستهای کانال بی به نام "عملیات رد فالکون" انداخت. این پادکست ماجرای واقعی یک مامور موساد است، که گزارشهای تخیلی به این سیستم اطلاعاتی میداده.

Just recently, I scratched my head literally in trying to find out on the Internet if dogs can really drink up whisky appreciatively. Then, I laughed and told myself, 'Why am I even bothered about that bit?'

This was my first Graham Greene read and while I have loved his darker, more cynical novels and entertainments to bits, there is something infectious and irresistible about the cheerful and deliciously campy spirit of this book. It is a pure, absurdly hilarious 'entertainment', Graham Greene style and even for his penchant for moral grayness and for making the preposterous sound prescient, it is just classic, laid-back and light-hearted fun.

There is no moral dilemma, there are no paradoxical conundrums; there is just Jim Wormold, a hapless and harried vacuum cleaner salesman trying to eke out a decent living in 1950s Havana, that happens to be having more power cuts than usual. Decent, that is, to be good enough for his beautifully fickle-minded daughter Milly, a vivacious girl who makes us both swoon and sweat in frustration, as we and Wormold try to make some sense of both her Catholic fads and her shopaholic tendencies.

Out of the blue, he is recruited as a spy by the British intelligence, who think that they need a man in Cuba to be abreast of things happening there to help out their American cousins. Poor Wormold has no say in the matter but how he embraces the lunacy of the project is just audaciously brilliant. Blast, thinking of it now makes me aware of just how much fun Greene was capable of. Talk about versatility.

Some things, however, don't change in Greeneland. Any other potboiler writer would have populated this premise with stock stereotypes but Greene, being the rascally intelligent yet wonderfully compassionate writer, gives us characters to love, in all their shades of white, grey and many colors at once. Nobody is what he or she seems and while that is mostly a serious thing in most thrillers, all of this is such a goofy lark that it would even sound ridiculous. But Greene's balance is so steady and his sense of mood, flipping from snappy to faintly growing tinges of darkness into the narrative arc, is so immaculate that you will drink it up like a daiquiri and hail it as a nectar of blissful escapism.

I can only salivate over the film adaptation, which was helmed, impressively, by Sir Carol Reed, the one director with whom the famously nitpicking Greene could be himself and even affable. There is good reason for that too; the film promises to be even more outrageous and funny than the novel. And Sir Alec Guinness seems like he was born to play Wormold.

Oh and I did find out the truth about dogs. They do like a bit of whisky now and then, even though it is not at all advisable for their livers. As I said, this is Greeneland and you are in for a roller-coaster ride of laughs and even plenty of suspense.

A 3.5 star book.

For this title I have once kept a paperback hoping to read enjoyably but, for some reason, I simply could not have a go after some ten pages thinking it was not my cup of tea, I mean the genre involving espionage or secret service (I don't think 'spy fiction' suggests anything positive, rather it reveals inevitable betrayal, high treason and digital sabotage in the 21st century). However, I have recently resolved to pick up his "The Confidential Agent" and happily made it as the second Greene novel after his more famously acclaimed "The Power and the Glory" in which its extract my classmates and I were assigned to read and study some 50 years ago as mentioned in my GR review. So this is my third Greene fiction reading, in fact, his books I read included "A Sort of Life" many years ago and a few weeks ago, "Ways of Escape."

It happened around early this month when I came across this Vintage paperback at the DASA BookCafe and swiftly I decided to have it as part of trade-in exchange since its handsome volume with readable fonts impressed me, in other words, it simply enticed me to have a look and read the whole story. I thought OK, it's better late than never because of my decision to leave my unread former copy at the BookCafe some months ago.

One good point of this edition is that it has a 16-page introduction (in which, I think, should be of help as essential background to those newcomers) by Christopher Hitchens written in 2006. I think first of all we need faith before we try doing something we are reluctant/not sure if we can keep going till the end. First, I always found reading its synopsis (back cover) encouragingly helpful, then a few brief recommendations nearby, for instance:

'As comical, satirical, atmospherical an "entertainment" as he has given us'
Daily Telegraph

Therefore, we should treat this book as a seeming entertainment encapsulating the three key words, that is, those related settings, characters, structures, and so on would eventually develop in the dialog/narrations which include

A) Funny Passages:
'Oh, are you married?' Milly asked with phony curiosity.
'I was married.'
'Is he dead?'
'Not that I know of. He sort of faded away.'
... (p. 96)
With his hand on the door Carter paused again. He said, 'Perhaps it would be more sensible - some other night. You know, I h-h-h-h ... '
'You are frightened, Carter.'
'I've never been to a h-h-h-house before. To tell you the truth, Wormold, I don't h-have much need of women.'
... ( p. 207) etc.

B) Mocking Ones:
... He said, 'I thought I was doing you a favour by coming to warn you, but it looks as if death for you might be the best solution.'
'You are a very mystifying young man.'
'Not young. It's you, Professor, who are young by the look of things.' In his anxiety he spoke aloud, 'If only Beatrice were here.'
... ( p. 136)
... Somebody must have brought influence to bear on Dr Brown, somebody who had to be identified at any cost. He thought, I am the cost.
'I bet you'll be a sensation.'
'I'm trying hard not to be a sensation at this lunch.'
... ( p. 170) etc.

C) Some Producing Feelings of Mysterious Strangeness:
Wormold drank his daiquiri too fast and left the Havana Club with his eyes aching. ... ( p. 157)
... Suddenly he felt happy. He might have killed a man. He had proved conclusively to himself that he wasn't one of the judges; he had no vocation for violence. Then Carter fired.
(p. 209) etc.

First published in 1958, this novel might have been categorized as a common agent working like other people in other professions; eventually, 20 years later his "The Human Factor" (Everyman's Library, 1992) was published depicting some agents working in the British Intelligence Agency amid the Cold War and for some reason the key protagonist (Castle) has to defect and escape to the USSR.

In brief, this novel is worth spending our time if we like Greene and don't mind following his narration, dialogs, words or phrases, etc. However, we couldn't expect sensational thrills like those by Ian Fleming in his James Bond series.

4.0 Stars. This was my first Graham Greene novel, and I selected this one mostly because I’d heard so much about it and was eager to read it for that reason. Also, because I grew up in South Florida in the 1960’s and 1970’s, so have more than a passing fascination with Cuba.

Bottom line: I loved this book. At once hilarious, bizarre, absurd and ridiculous, but with a very soft and warm center that only a man who has people to really love can provide.

The character of Wormold, our protagonist, starts out as a man beaten down by life. He runs a dreary little vacuum cleaner business in Havana, and, barely getting by after his wife left him years ago, he continues to raise his 16 year old daughter as a single parent. His only real friend and drinking buddy is the elderly retired doctor Dr Hasselbacher, a German national who has been in Havana even longer than Wormold has. Both are resigned to their existence as scruffy men at the fringe, destined to drink out their days in the hot sun of late 1950’s Cuba. For Wormold, the only bright light in his life is his daughter Mily, whom he lives for.

Then Wormold meets Hawthorne, a British spy who recruits Wormold into the spy game quite against his will, With no training and absolutely nothing to offer in the way of useful spy-like information or intelligence, at first Wormold rebuffs Hawthorne, believing his to be a preposterous offer. But when Hawthorn refuses to take ‘no’ for an answer, the hijinks begin. Wormold begins crafting the life of a spy completely out of thin air: fake intelligence, reports, and even other people he has supposedly recruited into the game. All was believed back in the Home Office, and of course the lies become more and more outrageous as they compound.

Of course, the entire book is written as satire of the Cold War, at the time at its very peak of hysterical paranoia. Spies were everywhere, but fortunately for Britain, they had Wormold, Our Man in Havana.

In particular, I loved how this story was woven: the absurd life of a fake spy woven in straight-faced right next to the threads of fatherly love and concern for his daughter,, and that, right next to the inclusion of sundry dangerous Caribbean characters of all kinds. I was rooting for Wormold, a guy you really hoped would find a way to really live again.

Romanzo da tempo immemorabile nel mio "Elenco di libri da leggere", Il nostro agente all'Avana è una satira, in alcuni punti assurda e divertente e in altri davvero amara, dei romanzi di spionaggio e della guerra fredda. Siamo nel 1958, Wormold è un inglese, rappresentante di una ditta di aspirapolvere, che vive da anni a Cuba, con la figlia adolescente Milly (la moglie l'ha lasciato parecchio tempo fa). Nonostante la calma apparente in cui vivono i numerosi stranieri residenti, l'isola è attraversata da tensioni, visti dei non precisati gruppi di ribelli in lotta contro il governo (di lì a pochi anni sarebbe in effetti avvenuta la rivoluzione castrista). In modo piuttosto assurdo, il tranquillo Wormold viene reclutato dal servizio segreto britannico per raccogliere e fornire informazioni sulla situazione interna: non avendo la più pallida idea di come fare, il povero Wormold decide di inviare dei rapporti... inventati di sana pianta, immaginandosi una rete di subagenti da lui controllati e inquietanti rivelazioni su basi militari finanziate da Mosca. Viene preso assolutamente sul serio e gli vengono affidati compiti sempre più delicati, ma, incredibilmente... a un certo punto le sue invenzioni sembrano diventare tragicamente reali!
Il libro scorre via piuttosto velocemente, ritmato da dialoghi brillanti e surreali e da scenette divertenti (su tutte, i disegni di una nuova terribile arma top secret che i ribelli stanno costruendo e che l'agente 59200 - Wormold - riesce a inviare a Londra... che in realtà sono rappresentazioni in scala gigante di parti di un aspirapolvere!); ho apprezzato un po' meno l'ultima parte, più seria. La morale di Greene, che il gioco delle due superpotenze è un teatrino assurdo che stritola vite innocenti ammantandosi di ideologie altisonanti ma vane, e che è più "saggio" chi rimane fedele a un ideale più limitato ma autentico (contrapposto anche alla fede ostentata ma insincera della figlia), tutto sommato mi è parsa un po' angusta e non interamente condivisibile.

A brilliant, hilarious read of espionage and pompous civil servants who are so inept they're not fit to run a chip shop. Perhaps not so funny if you've worked for the civil service and you realise that the story is entirely feasible. Uncannily reminiscent of The Tailor of Panama. A spymaster and an expat on the ground in Cuba manage to concoct between them, but entirely without each other's knowledge, a fantasy international plot, which allows the "source" to receive generous ex-gratis payments, and the spy to convince his masters in the UK that he is doing something useful, and worth a generous budget. The joke wears off when people start to get killed; but they've started so they have to finish. Is that what happened in East Timor? Quickly everyone moved on before anyone noticed what had happened, and at least the Australian PM got a successful war to add to his CV, not to mention access to gas fields on the continental shelf.

This didn't really appeal to me much. It was meant to be comedic in tone and I suppose I found it slightly so. It is Graham Greene taking a shot at the world of British Intelligence in pre-Castro Cuba. Most reviewers seemed to like this so I think the problem is mine rather than the book's!

Mr. Greene and I are finished. We retreat to our separate corners having fought to a draw. Well, who am I kidding? His reputation is unblemished by the fact that reading his books makes me break out in hives. In sum, he mastered the art of British snobbery at a time when such mastery was routinely mistaken for brilliance.

To its credit, this book spawned many imitators, notably the vastly-superior The Tailor of Panama, by John LeCarre. But that doesn't mean you should read this.

(The Quiet American was flawed but genuinely brilliant and exempt from this conversation.)