The Quiet American by Graham Greene
I always wanted to read Graham Greene after seeing the movie Donnie Darko. My step-dad gave me this book to read, but I put it away for awhile because it reminded me of college research papers. I'm trying to shake it up a bit with the genres that I'm reading so that I don't get bored. After reading Chick Lit for #2, I decided to go to the opposite end of the spectrum with #3.
The Quiet American is about a British journalist named Fowler living in Saigon during the First Indochina War. He meets a young American named Pyle, who is the poster boy for American idealism. Pyle has a black-and-white view on the current war that doesn't sit well with Fowler. Add that Pyle ends up with Fowler's Vietnamese girlfriend, and you would think Fowler would hate Pyle. Somehow they end up as friends. Pyle is found dead at the beginning of the book and the story goes back and forth between the two years that Fowler knew Pyle and the investigation of Pyle's death. The ending, at least for me, isn't really a shocker, but the way that Greene got there was very interesting.
I enjoyed the book, but I wish that I would have looked up some info on the war before I started. Thanks to Wikipedia, I was able to follow along. The Quiet American is also a movie starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go add it to my Netflix queue.
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