Most helpful customer reviews
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Comedians, Sep 2 2001
One of the funny things about this book--it is, after all, about comedians--is that everyone in it imagines that the Americans are going to invade any minute, or if Papa Doc collapses. As unlikely as that seemed when I first read it, now you can reread it after the Americans really did invade, or at least occupy. The comedians are all refugees of WWII: Brown's aunt fought in the resistance and Martha is the daughter of a Nazi,and Major Jones fought in Burma, or so he says. Those are strange details for Greene to add, and they also screw up the chronology if the book takes place when it was written, 1965. The earliest the aunt could have been born is 1895, which makes her 70 and much too old to have a young lover, and even then she would have had to have Brown when she was 15 if Brown is to 55, even though he is supposedly 60-ish. The comedians follow the tragedy, and they all, except for the Tontons Macoute, have very bad timing. If you want to figure out the book, it seems to me that you have to know why Martha is the daughter of a Nazi--how or why could it matter? Why that almost gratuitious allusion? The comedians are somewhere between Europe, which they fled, and the US, which is about to occupy. They are like Jones, who tries to escape the Tontons Macoute by boarding a foreign vessel which is not exactly his home, either.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Terror , malaise and indifference in a land gone mad, Jul 1 2001
If only Graham Greene were still alive and turning out great works like "The Comedians"! Today's shrill jumbled postmodern prose is no match for the steady understated yet vastly effective pen of Graham Greene. "The Comedians" is Greene at his near best. The protagonist, Brown, is a man without a country who has returned from a previous exile to a hotel inherted from his distant mother in Petionville, Haiti during the reign of the monomaniacal dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Aboard the moribund freighter to Port-Au-Prince are the Smiths (a couple of painfully earnest American vegetarian liberals who are blind to any possible problems that could exist in Haiti as a way to expiate their upper-class white guilt), and Jones, a shady British expat who tells unlikely anecdotes about his experiences in various wars and overseas diplomatic posts. As they land, their lives slowly become intertwined. Brown's Haiti is a land in under the spell of a comedic terror. Papa Doc's militia, the Tontons Macoutes, with their sunglasses worn at night, and their rusty guns with no bullets, plunge the land into a nightmare of extortion, kidnapping, murder and chaos. Indeed, when Brown first returns to the hotel, he is confronted with the body of politician who chose to commit suicide in Brown's pool instead of being captured by the Tontons Macoutes. Brown attempts to remain a neutral observer in the chaos going on around him, but is soon caught up in affairs when they encroach even further on his hotel. His pointless and emotionally destructive affair with the wife of a South American diplomat in Port-Au-Prince only confounds his malaise, and realizes that he, Papa Doc, the Smiths, Jones, the Tontons Macoutes, everyone - are playing the role of the comedians in the tragedy of life. Whenever I tire of the embarassingly overpraised mush that passes for modern fiction, I always return to Graham Greene's deliberately understated (never smirking) irony and imagery. Instead of the tautologies and abused metaphors that pass for profundity in today's overly florid "serious" novels, Greene's economical, yet satisfying, imagery and wry prose are sorely missed. This isn't Greene's best work, but it's not far from it either.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Vintage Graham Greene, Sep 14 2000
By A Customer
For those of us who have spent a lifetime reading the works of Graham Greene (which we can do because he spent an even longer lifetime producing brilliant work), of this we are certain: Graham Greene is the greatest writer in the English language maybe of the entire Twentieth Century. His body of work is staggering, and "The Comedians" is right up there with the best of them. Expertly weaving the dread and menace of Haiti under Papa Doc with the intimate, personal lives of a classic collection of displaced European and American characters, Greene does what he always does: he makes the personal political, and vice versa. "The Comedians" is sublime.
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