Our Man in Havana
MI6's man in Havana is Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Charles Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start coming disturbingly true... First published in 1959 against the backdrop of the Cold War, Our Man in Havana remains one of Graham Greene's most widely read novels. It is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire of government intelligence that still resonates today. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Christopher Hitchens. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Community Reviews
Tongue-in-cheek spy novel that gets a bit dark and more exciting as it goes on. Graham Greene is a confusing author for me because he wrote one of my favorite literary works, The End of the Affair, but his writing isn't limited to literary fiction, and The Third Man, for example, is just some noir nonsense. This was sort of in between but I did enjoy it.
I was especially interested in the pre-Castro Cuban setting. My family is from Cuba, and around this time my grandparents would have been in their 20s. My paternal side moved to Santa Clara at about the time of the story (the main character James Wormold goes there on vacation). My maternal side moved to Havana shortly after the time period of the novel. All Cuban-Americans are devoutly anti-Castro but the sacrilegious question is always whether the dictator that preceded him, Batista, was also a bad guy. This makes the character Segura particularly interesting to me, especially since Greene doesn't make him as one-dimensional as it initially appears.
I was especially interested in the pre-Castro Cuban setting. My family is from Cuba, and around this time my grandparents would have been in their 20s. My paternal side moved to Santa Clara at about the time of the story (the main character James Wormold goes there on vacation). My maternal side moved to Havana shortly after the time period of the novel. All Cuban-Americans are devoutly anti-Castro but the sacrilegious question is always whether the dictator that preceded him, Batista, was also a bad guy. This makes the character Segura particularly interesting to me, especially since Greene doesn't make him as one-dimensional as it initially appears.
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