Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3223 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Synopsis
Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman in a city of powercuts. His adolescent daughter spends his money with a skill that amazes him so when a mysterious Englishman offers him an extra income he's tempted. In return all he has to do is file a few reports. But when his fake reports start coming true things suddenly get more complicated and Havana becomes a threatening place.

Customer Reviews

A comic masterpiece
I read this book when I was 16 and it was the funniest thing I had ever read. I remember being impressed at the range of Greene. Was this the same person who had written Brighton Rock?!

Having just read this book again, it's just as funny. It ranks up there with Three Men in a Boat. Strange how so much of it has stuck in my memory after all these years - little images, especially relating to Beatrice: the smell of her hair, her hands on the wheel of the car.

Wormold making his drawings of 'installations in the mountains' based on the insides of the vacumn cleaners he sells, and Hawthorne cringingly recognising them for what they are is just brilliant. Lots of other very funny moments abound. The dinner near the end is another highlight and is written in a masterful, filmic style reminiscent of The Great Gatsby.

Something of an entertainment
I've been working my way through the novels of Graham Greene for some time, and have found that a little goes a long way: the last one I read was "The Heart Of The Matter" a year or so ago, and found that story of unrelenting failure to be so unhappy that I wasn't keen to pick him up again for a while. By contrast, "Our Man In Havana" was classified by its author as an 'entertainment', and its style is somewhat more playful and ironic, although the central character is still weighed down by his struggles to make sense of his world. It's been pointed out elsewhere that Greene's stories have a habit of coming true in real life, and this cynical study of espionage in pre-revolutionary Cuba appears to epitomise that. For me, it had other resonances as the widely-acknowledged inspiration for John le Carre's 1996 novel "The Tailor Of Panama", which translated the plot about a thousand miles south, but retained the mordant humour of this odd little story.

Fifties humour for Graham Greene buffs
I disagree with other reviewers inasmuch as I consider Our Man in Havana to be principally for Graham Greene buffs. A dull English vacuum cleaner salesman in fifties Cuba is recruited into farcical espionage in a public toilet. He agrees to get involved in order to pay for the whims of his empty-headed daughter. For me, it has not stood the test of time that well as the humour is dated and the satire rather tame. Neither is it especially useful as a fictional document of the Cold War à la John Le Carré because the story is deliberately implausible. Batista's Cuba was a place of entrenched corruption and poverty but I did not really get the feel of the period or the place. I believe, though, that the impact of this novel has been diluted by time.