“His very personal religion of man”: the reception of Graham Greene’s novels in state socialist Romania

6 octombrie 2021 · de Andrei Gorzo | în English | etichetat A Burnt-Out Case, A Gun for Sale, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Berkhamsted, Brighton Rock, Catholic culture, Charles Péguy, Confidential Agent, Edmund Wilson, England Made Me, François Mauriac, G. K. Chesterton, Gabriel García Márquez, Georg Lukács, Georges Simenon, Gianina Daniela Popovici-Sabău, Graham Greene, Graham Greene International Festival, It's a Battlefield, James Hadley Chase, James Wood, John Banville, Mary McCarthy, Mihai Iovănel, Nicolae Steinhardt, Our Man in Havana, Partisan Review, Petre Solomon, Radu Lupan, Richard Greene, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Stone, Stamboul Train, state socialist Romania, Terry Eagleton, The Comedians, The End of the Affair, The Heart of the Matter, The Honorary Consul, The Human Factor, The Ministry of Fear, The Power and the Glory, The Quiet American, The Third Man, Travels with My Aunt, Wilkie Collins, Zane Grey

This is a draft for a talk that I recently gave in Berkhamsted, where I had the honour of being invited to the 22nd edition of the Graham Greene International Festival (30 September – 3 October 2021). Let me start by saying that I’m absolutely thrilled to be here at the Graham Greene International Festival. Thank […]

Playing literary detective

2 noiembrie 2020 · de Andrei Gorzo | în English | etichetat Brighton Rock, Catherine Walston, Claude Edmonde-Magny, Graham Greene, Jonathan Wise, L’Âge du roman américain, Michael Hill, Richard Greene, Russian Roulette The Life and Times of Graham Greene, The Age of the American Novel, The Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, The Ministry of Fear, The Quiet American

Reading Professor Richard Greene’s magnificent new biography of Graham Greene, I came across a character named Claudette Monde – a French literary critic with whom Greene claimed (to Catherine Walston) to have had an affair (in September 1946 or thereabouts). Since no French literary critic with that name seems to have existed, the biographer concludes […]

From the website of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust

11 iulie 2020 · de Andrei Gorzo | în English | etichetat Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, The Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, The Quiet American

My paper “The Battle over The Quiet American”, written for this blog in 2017, has just been published on the website of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust. A version of it will also appear in the Trust’s newsletter.

Reworking Graham Greene: Robert Stone’s „A Flag for Sunrise”

5 iulie 2020 · de Andrei Gorzo | în English | etichetat A Burnt-Out Case, A Flag for Sunrise, Alexander Dubček, Alfred Hitchcock, American empire, Brighton Rock, Carol Reed, Che Guevara, Child of Light, Cold War, colonial novel, counterculture, cultural imperialism, Death of the Black-Haired Girl, Dog Soldiers, drug culture, Fredric Jameson, Gabriel García Márquez, Graham Greene, Heart of the Darkness, Ho Chi Minh, J. G. Ballard, John D. McClure, Joseph Conrad, Madison Smartt Bell, Martin Amis, neo-colonialism, Outerbridge Reach, post-colonial, Robert Solotaroff, Robert Stone, Salvador Allende, Terry Eagleton, The Comedians, The Eye You See With: Selected Nonfiction, The Heart of the Matter, The Honorary Consul, The Human Factor, The Power and the Glory, The Quiet American, The Third Man, Thomas Hardy, whiskey priest

Graham Greene’s influence on the American writer Robert Stone (1937-2015) was always stated by reviewers as self-evident; it is a commonplace in English-language reviews of Stone’s novels. In his 2020 biography of Stone, Child of Light, Madison Smartt Bell dismisses these comparisons, insisting that the similarities between the two novelists were superficial – a matter […]

The battle over „The Quiet American” (part two)

21 iunie 2017 · de Andrei Gorzo | în Critica de film, De dragul jocului, English, Istoria filmului | etichetat 1984, A.J. Liebling, Americanization, Animal Farm, Anti-Americanism, Audie Murphy, Christopher Hampton, CIA, Cinecittà, Claude Dauphin, Cold War, Edward Lansdale, George Orwell, Giorgia Moll, Graham Greene, Groucho Marx, Guy Burgess, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Joy Batchelor and John Halas, Kerima, Margaret Dumont, MI5, Michael Anderson, Michael Caine, Michael Redgrave, Michel Ciment, New Yorker, Ngo Dinh Diem, Phillip Noyce, Positif, Robert Schenkkan, Robert Stone, The Quiet American, Vanessa Redgrave | 1 comentariu

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1958 film version of The Quiet American was a polemical answer to Graham Greene’s novel – literary adaptation as (politically driven) literary criticism. More than that, it was an operation meant to “correct” the novel, to replace it in the public consciousness, to neutralize it: literary adaptation as propagandistic damage control. Like […]

The battle over „The Quiet American” (part one)

13 iunie 2017 · de Andrei Gorzo | în De dragul jocului, English, Istoria filmului | etichetat Alden Pyle, Anti-Americanism, British Malaya, Catholicism, Cold War, colonialism, Dostoevsky, Edward Lansdale, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, Fowler, Frederick Logevall, General Thé, George Orwell, Graham Greene, harboiled fiction, Hemingway, Henry James, Ho Chi Minh, Humphrey Bogart, Indochina, James Naremore, James Whale, Jonathan Nashel, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, journalism, Korean War, Life, Ngo Dinh Diem, No Way Back, Paris Match, Phuong, Pravda, Sunday Times, T. S. Eliot, The Fallen Idol, The Quiet American, The Ugly American, Third Force, Time, Trinh Minh Thé, ugly american, Vietminh, Vietnam War | 3 comentarii

This essay is based on notes for a seminar I conducted at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung (University of Arts and Design) in Karlsruhe, Germany, in July 2016, at the invitation of Professor Andrei Ujică. Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American was published in late 1955 in the U.K. and in early 1956 in the […]

Haunted by „The Third Man”

30 aprilie 2017 · de Andrei Gorzo | în De dragul jocului, English, Istoria filmului | etichetat A Gun for Sale, Alberto Cavalcanti, Alexander Korda, Alida Valli, Allen Dulles, Ann Fleming, Anthony Blunt, Brendan Bracken, Cambridge Spies, Carol Reed, Catholicism, Cold War, comic-book, David O. Selznick, Donald Maclean, Elizabeth Montagu, Engelbert Dollfuss, England Made Me, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Graham Greene, graphic short story, Guy Burgess, Hans-Peter Smolka, Harry Lime, Iron Curtain, It Always Rains on Sunday, Jean-Luc Fromental, John Banville, John le Carré, Jules Dassin, Kim Philby, Le Coup de Prague, liberation theology, Litzi Friedmann, Miles Hyman, My Silent War, Night and the City, Orson Welles, Paul Tabori, Peter Foges, Peter Smollett, Peter Wollen, Robert Hamer, Sidney Gilliat, Soviet Bloc, Soviet Union, spiv films, Stamboul Train, The Confidential Agent, The Heart of the Matter, The Human Factor, The Quiet American, The Third Man, The Untouchable, They Made Me a Fugitive, Tim Milne, Vienna, Waterloo Road, Wild Bill Donovan, Winston Churchill

Le Coup de Prague (The Prague Coup) is a short story in comic-book form, a collaboration between the French writer Jean-Luc Fromental and the American artist Miles Hyman, published (in French) in 2017. It is a visualization of the legend according to which the film The Third Man, a famous British-American co-production from 1949, is […]

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