Our Man in Havana
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- ¥1,600
発行者による作品情報
Adapted into the 1959 film starring Alec Guinness, this Telegraph Top 20 Spy Novel of All Time is "high-comic mayhem . . . [and] bizarrely prescient" (Christopher Buckley, New York Times–bestselling author).
James Wormold, a cash-strapped vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, finds the answer to his prayers when British Intelligence offers him a lucrative job as an undercover agent. To keep the checks coming, Wormold must at least pretend to know what he's doing. Soon, he's apparently deciphering incomprehensible codes, passing along sketches of secret weapons that look suspiciously like vacuum parts, and claiming to recruit fellow operatives from his country club, all to create the perfect picture of intrigue.
But when MI6 dispatches a secretary to oversee his endeavors, Wormold fears his carelessly fabricated world will come undone. Instead, it all comes true. Somehow, he's become the target of an assassin, and it's going to take more than a fib to get out of Cuba alive. Her Majesty's man in Havana may have to resort to spying.
Praise for Graham Greene
"A masterly storyteller . . . An enormously popular writer who was also one of the most significant novelists of his time." —Newsweek
"Graham Greene had wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature." —John le Carré, New York Times–bestselling author of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
"One of the finest writers of any language." —The Washington Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Actor Jeremy Northam (Gosford Park, Tristram Shandy) has himself a ball with Greene's comic suspense novel, its Cuban setting and panoply of international characters. He downplays the religious and political undertones of the book in favor of Greene's comedy of a vacuum-cleaner salesman turned secret agent. Greene's array of Germans, Brits and native Cubans allows Northam to trot out some of the choicest examples from his stable of voices, all cleverly done. The brief bits of salsa music that punctuate the breaks between chapters underscore Northam's jaunty reading. This is one classic novel meant to be enjoyed for entertainment, not self-improvement.
