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Our Man in Havana Audio Book
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Our Man in Havana
Author:
Graham Greene
Reader: Jeremy Northam
Because he needs the money, a former vacuum cleaner salesman turns reluctant secret agent. To keep his job, he files bogus reports, recruits imaginary sub-agents, and dreams up imaginary military installations. All goes fine... and then his stories start coming disturbingly true. Inspired by a real "spy" who invented a series of imaginary agents and divisions. "Northam has himself a ball... [He trots] out some of the choicest examples from his stable of voices, all cleverly done."—Publishers Weekly
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Available Audio Book Editions:
| A6X726 |
UNABRIDGED |
Audio CDs ( 6 ) |
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Publish Date: 05/01/2009
ISBN: 9781934997260
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Synopsis:
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A whimsical send-up of the spy genre finds vacuum salesman James, recently abandoned by his wife and financially beleaguered by his discriminating daughter, accepting work with the British secret service, where he hides the truth about a lack of information behind a vast network of agents and allegations about a vacuum cleaner's circuit diagram.
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Book Reviews:
| "Say what you will, this is a distinguished narrative idea, worthy of its distinguished author. Had he taken a walk around the block, decided to believe his own tale, and told it with simple conviction, it might have been hair-raising, all the more so from his personal knowledge of its background. Instead, he has used tricks, and achieved mostly unreality. His characters lack bone, flesh and blood, and only occasionally seem lifelike. They are dumb when convenience requires, rarely showing initiative on their own. The mystery doesn't mystify but mainly begets confusion, and the same can be said for the daughter's Catholicism....All in all, as little as a Greene fan likes to say it, this book misses, and in a thoroughly heartbreaking way, for it misses needlessly where it might have rung the bell." |
| New York Times Book Review - James M. Cain (10/26/1958) |
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Author Bio:
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Greene was one of six children, the son of the headmaster of a boys' school, and a cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson. A shy, unhappy child, he made several suicide attempts. After attending Oxford (where he made a specialty of Russian roulette), in 1927 he married Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a Catholic--an act that enraged his family. The estrangement became even worse when Greene himself converted to Catholicism. He and his wife--to whom Greene was chronically unfaithful--had a son and a daughter, and later separated. Greene began his writing career as a journalist, but in 1929, his first novel, THE MAN WITHIN, was published, and thereafter he made his living as a writer--at first with difficulty, later with considerable success. Greene classified his fiction as either serious novels or "entertainments," in which he begins with the conventions of genre fiction but invariably lifts them into the realm of literature by the power of his writing. (BRIGHTON ROCK is only one of many examples.) A large percentage of his works also explore the Catholic themes of sin and redemption. Greene was an intelligence agent in World War II, which gave him material for some of his best spy novels. He wrote in nearly every literary genre, and more than 20 of his works have been made into movies including THE QUIET AMERICAN in 1958 (a film Greene loathed for its falsely happy ending and excision of the novel's strongly anti-American sentiments) and again in 2002 (a critically acclaimed film that restored Greene's themes); he also wrote screenplays and film reviews. Greene lived to be 86, and continued to write until nearly the end of his life.
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