My first contact with "The Quiet American" was from a movie with the
same name. After seeing the excellenet movie, the desire to read the
original novel grew stronger and stronger.
I managed to borrow one from the local library and finished it in
two days. My conclusion is that the movie is excellent but the novel
is even better. This is one of few books I want to collect.
I am very attracted by the main character, Thomas Folwer, in the
novel. He is a Britan journalist in Vietnam and he is the narrator in
the novel.
I like him perhpas because I also believe in cynicism and I am an
isolationist, too.
I like many sentences in the book. I list some of them here ( not in
any perticular order ):
* I thought of the first day and Pyle sitting beside me at the
Continental, with his eye on the soda-fountain across the
way. Everything has gone right with me since he had dead, but how I
wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I am sorry.
* Was I so different from Pyle, I wondered? Must I too have my foot
thrust in the mess of life before I saw the pain?
* He was like an emblematic statue of all I thought I hated in America
-- as ill designed as the Statue of Liberty and as meaningless.
(Fowler's comment about Granger)
* Thanks him for nothing.
* I shut my eyes and she was again the same as she used to be: she was
the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the
night and the promise of rest.
* Pyle was very earnest and I had suffered from his lectures on the
Far East, which he had known for as many months as I had years.
* These were the open legal methods, but legality was not essential in
a country at war.
* When I refused to allow him to question Phuong without me he gave
way at once, with a single sign that might have represented his
weariness with Saigon, with the heat, or with the whole human
condition.
* An unmistakably young and unused face flung at us like a dart.
* With his gangly legs and his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze he
seemed incapable of harm. (It turns out that Pyle is the very person
who caused a lot of harm to others.)
* One forgets so quickly one's own youth.
* He didn't even hear what I said; he was absorbed already in the
dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was
determined to do good, not to any individual person but to a
country, a continent, a world.
* Death takes away vanity.
* But hadn't I on my first walk up the rue Catinat noticed first the
shop with the Guerlain perfume and comforted myself with the thought
that, after all, Europe was only distant thirty hours?
* When I first came I counted the days of my assignment, like a
schoolboy marking off the days of term.
* Perhaps he was studying sex, as he studied the East, on paper.
* Suddenly I was angry; I was tired of the whole pack of them with
their private stores of Coca-Cola and their portable hospitals and
their too wide cars and their not quite latest guns.
* "Yes. They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was
young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of
a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about, and you gave
him money and York Harding's book on the East and said, ``Go
ahead. Win the East for Democarcy.'' He never saw anything he hadn't
heard in a lecture-hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a
fool of him. When he saw a dead body he couldn't even see the
wounds. A Red menace, a soldier of democracy."
