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Title: Travels With My Aunt (Twentieth Century Classics) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0-14-018501-1 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.08 (13 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: A Bittersweet Tale of Middle-Age
Comment: Finally, a Graham Greene book I sort of liked (following disappointing experiences with Stamboul Train and This Gun For Hire)! That said, it's not great stuff, but it's at least fairly entertaining, diverting, and sad. The tale is of Henry, a middle-aged bachelor (and presumably virgin) who has been forced to retire from his bank job after 30 years. He's a total zero, dull and timid, with nothing to look forward to but 30 years of watering his dahlias. At his mother's funeral he meets his Aunt Augusta for the first time since his baptism, and she immediately rocks his world by announcing that his mother was in fact not this biological mother. She then proceeds to disrupt his empty life by insisting on his accompaniment for a various trips, notably a ride on the Orient Express to Istanbul, and a furtive trip to Paraguay. She's old, but with way more zest than her nephew, and their interplay is a clear call for everyone to live life and not let it drift by (carpe diem and all that). Of course, her interpretation of this involves smuggling a gold ingot, running around with a young Sierra Leonian pot merchant, and tracking down her Italian war criminal lover-all while spinning tales of her life and loves. Of course, it's obvious to everyone except Henry that his "aunt" is his real mother, but that the one story which goes untold. In the end, it's hard not to feel sad for the pitiful Henry, whose passive approach to life is characterized as being a product of his upbringing.
Rating: 5
Summary: Alistair Maclean written by Barbara Pym - bon voyage!
Comment: 'Travels' is not a great novel, not even a great Graham Greene novel. It is flawed, mannered, contrived, old-fashioned, complacent; the work of a writer who has earned his laurels and is content to lounge on them. The frequent allusions to then-modish Latin American fiction (the novel ends up in Paraguay) only exposes its lack of adventurousness. Sometimes you wonder whether the maddening primness is the narrator's or the author's. Too often, Greene resorts to caricature rather than character, and even the splendid figure of Aunt Augusta feels like a writerly short-cut.
But.
'Travels' is one of the most purely pleasurable books I have ever read, largely due to the perfectly captured narrative voice, a middle-aged virgin, retired bank manager and dahlia expert unwittingly thrown into a world of smuggling, soft drugs, hippies, war criminals, CIA operatives, military dictatorships, and whose decent, limited tolerance keeps the fantastic narrative believable, but also blinds him to genuine horrors.
The book contains some of Greene's funniest writing; if he'd written it 30 years earlier he's have called it an 'entertainment', those more generic or populist works that weren't overtly concerned with great moral themes. Today, these entertainments seem to have dated better than the 'serious' books.
Of course, 30 years on and Greene can relax his style - the plot is less vice-like, the words don't imprison - rather, they eloquently express a developing consciousness and sensibility. This is a story that proliferates with stories, some comic, some tragic, some parable-lie, all leading inexorably towards one untold story. Like all Greene's novels, 'Travels' concerns modern man's search for home, and the ending is devastating, mixing imagistic beauty with characteristically flat cynicism.
Rating: 4
Summary: Age is no measure of vitality
Comment: Travels With My Aunt is a fairly short amusing farce, that chronicles the impact of long lost Aunt Augusta coming back into the Henry's life.
Aunt Augusta is very old (we never learn quite how old)but vital and lively dragging our initially reluctant hero half way around the world into a dark world of smuggling, South American Dictatorships and the CIA. Middle Aged Henry in contrast in cautious, timid, bored and dull in the extreme. A Bank Manager forced to retire early after a merger, Henry has thrown himself into a life of Daliah growing and visiting rather than worshiping at the local church, as his entertainment. Initially shocked by his wild octaganerian Auntie, he develops a taste for new adventure and living life on the edge.
Travels With My Aunt is clearly not what you would call typical Greene, however it works because of the stark contrast between the characters. Aunt Augusta is a wanton disgraceful character that captures your affection immediately, while Henry is a good but boring man that fails to penetrate the emotions beyond a kind of grudging pity.
Beyond the humor of his farce Greene challenges us to live, not merely exist and in doing so enjoy what little time we have. He illustrates that if we achieve the goal of removing all risk in our lives to guarantee longevity, we have destroyed the essence of life and longevity is therefore undesirable.
In addition to the novel I have seen Travels With My Aunt as a very clever and entertaining stage play, which I would also recommend.
This is not the authors greatest work by any means, however it is hugely enjoyable, very funny and has a message that we all would do well to heed. All in all a great little package that is well worth reading.
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Title: Euripides: Medea, Hippolytus, Electra, Helen (Oxford World's Classics) by Euripides, James Morwood ISBN: 0192824422 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: July, 1998 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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Title: The Woman Warrior : Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston ISBN: 0679721886 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 23 April, 1989 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment (Twentieth Century Classics) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140184937 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: September, 1991 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Comedians (Twentieth Century Classics) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140184945 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1991 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Quiet American (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140185003 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1991 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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