--- product_id: 1234839 title: "The Quiet American (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)" price: "243 kr" currency: NOK in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.no/products/1234839-the-quiet-american-penguin-classics-deluxe-edition store_origin: NO region: Norway --- # The Quiet American (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) **Price:** 243 kr **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** The Quiet American (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) - **How much does it cost?** 243 kr with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.no](https://www.desertcart.no/products/1234839-the-quiet-american-penguin-classics-deluxe-edition) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description Graham Greene's classic exploration of love, innocence, and morality in Vietnam "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," Graham Greene's narrator Fowler remarks of Alden Pyle, the eponymous "Quiet American" of what is perhaps the most controversial novel of his career. Pyle is the brash young idealist sent out by Washington on a mysterious mission to Saigon, where the French Army struggles against the Vietminh guerrillas. As young Pyle's well-intentioned policies blunder into bloodshed, Fowler, a seasoned and cynical British reporter, finds it impossible to stand safely aside as an observer. But Fowler's motives for intervening are suspect, both to the police and himself, for Pyle has stolen Fowler's beautiful Vietnamese mistress. Originally published in 1956 and twice adapted to film, The Quiet American remains a terrifiying and prescient portrait of innocence at large. This Graham Greene Centennial Edition includes a new introductory essay by Robert Stone. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. Review: A Fascinating Novel About 1950s Vietnam Authored by An Iconic British Author - "The Quiet American" is a really interesting and well written novel. It was authored in the 1950s. It is set in Vietnam in the 1950s during fighting that includes the French and predates official American military involvement. The author, Graham Greene is an iconic British author. The protagonist is a British Journalist. The story involves political intrigue, romance, and some adventure. It is not necessarily a fast pacd novel. It is a very well written story that allows for a lot of contemplation. In retrospect it looks like a warning to America about what the future in Vietnam holds. I took my time reading this novel and found it fascinating. This story is the type of novel that is not always a "light read". It is a thinking person's novel. There is some symbolism. I accessed a copy of Spark Notes on line for free and studied the novel as I read. I read chapters and then studied Spark Notes for that chapter. I am glad that I did so. It added to the experience. However the novel is comprehensible without the additional study. I really liked this novel and am quite glad that i read it. In case it matters I also listened on audiobook and read simultaneously. I am glad that I did both. There were times I re read certain episodes that seemed intellectually deep. This is the kind of novel I read when I have time to concentrate. It was both enjoyable and really worth the effort. Thank You... Review: The Quiet American by Graham Greene - This book gives a stark and unsparing on-the-ground view of Vietnam, or French Indochina as it was commonly referred to at the time, and early French and American involvement, in the early 1950s. The author was openly disdainful in real life of what he perceived as American crassness and naivete, which he proceeds to (sometimes blastingly, sometimes almost-sympathetically) portray in this story of Pyle, an idealistic young anti-communist American "diplomat", with devastating effect simply because Greene's contempt and rage are not without merit. Greene's belief that innocence is an evil in the world is disconcerting on a certain level, an idea worth struggling with. There is plenty of sometimes-lethal action, intrigue and an unflinching if subtly-couched look at the character flaws of the book's first-person British-journalist narrator, including but not limited to his reactions to Pyle's s stealing his Vietnamese girlfriend. The grim joke in the book's title is in the fact that Pyle dies in the beginning pages, making him a very quiet American indeed. The rest of the book is flash-back, detailing the intrigues, unique to that time and place and struggle and culture (including Pyle's callousness to the deaths of innocents in advance of his desire to impose "democracy" on another culture and country) that lead to his death. This book is a sobering learning experience, in view of the later American military involvement, whose denouement validated much of what this book has to say. Whether such a cynical view of the world is fully merited is a question for the individual reader to mull. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #14,771 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #127 in Classic American Literature #231 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction #285 in Espionage Thrillers (Books) | | Customer Reviews | 4.4 out of 5 stars 9,644 Reviews | ## Images ![The Quiet American (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81dB26QG3aL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A Fascinating Novel About 1950s Vietnam Authored by An Iconic British Author *by F***Y on April 1, 2020* "The Quiet American" is a really interesting and well written novel. It was authored in the 1950s. It is set in Vietnam in the 1950s during fighting that includes the French and predates official American military involvement. The author, Graham Greene is an iconic British author. The protagonist is a British Journalist. The story involves political intrigue, romance, and some adventure. It is not necessarily a fast pacd novel. It is a very well written story that allows for a lot of contemplation. In retrospect it looks like a warning to America about what the future in Vietnam holds. I took my time reading this novel and found it fascinating. This story is the type of novel that is not always a "light read". It is a thinking person's novel. There is some symbolism. I accessed a copy of Spark Notes on line for free and studied the novel as I read. I read chapters and then studied Spark Notes for that chapter. I am glad that I did so. It added to the experience. However the novel is comprehensible without the additional study. I really liked this novel and am quite glad that i read it. In case it matters I also listened on audiobook and read simultaneously. I am glad that I did both. There were times I re read certain episodes that seemed intellectually deep. This is the kind of novel I read when I have time to concentrate. It was both enjoyable and really worth the effort. Thank You... ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Quiet American by Graham Greene *by J***D on May 29, 2014* This book gives a stark and unsparing on-the-ground view of Vietnam, or French Indochina as it was commonly referred to at the time, and early French and American involvement, in the early 1950s. The author was openly disdainful in real life of what he perceived as American crassness and naivete, which he proceeds to (sometimes blastingly, sometimes almost-sympathetically) portray in this story of Pyle, an idealistic young anti-communist American "diplomat", with devastating effect simply because Greene's contempt and rage are not without merit. Greene's belief that innocence is an evil in the world is disconcerting on a certain level, an idea worth struggling with. There is plenty of sometimes-lethal action, intrigue and an unflinching if subtly-couched look at the character flaws of the book's first-person British-journalist narrator, including but not limited to his reactions to Pyle's s stealing his Vietnamese girlfriend. The grim joke in the book's title is in the fact that Pyle dies in the beginning pages, making him a very quiet American indeed. The rest of the book is flash-back, detailing the intrigues, unique to that time and place and struggle and culture (including Pyle's callousness to the deaths of innocents in advance of his desire to impose "democracy" on another culture and country) that lead to his death. This book is a sobering learning experience, in view of the later American military involvement, whose denouement validated much of what this book has to say. Whether such a cynical view of the world is fully merited is a question for the individual reader to mull. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ It's Always 1955 in Greene Land ! *by G***O on October 6, 2011* Or perhaps it's that the 1950s lasted 30 years in England. It was plainly still 1955 in England when i spent some months there in 1979, and indeed I suspect that it was 1955 for Graham Greene from the end of World War 2 until the catastrophe of Margaret Thatcher. Greene wrote six books in the '50s or thereabouts: The Third Man (1949), The End of the Affair, Loser Takes All, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, and A Burnt-Out Case (1960). In none of them was the awkward Quietist Catholicism of his earlier novels sustained; instead both his 'novels' and his 'entertainments' became increasingly anti-colonial in content and critical of both Catholic and Anglo-American values. Throughout his long career, nonetheless, Greene was the most ineffably British of novelists, at least as we readers perceive him through his literary personae, in whom diffidence and arrogance are two faces of the same shilling. The 'narrator' of The Quiet American, the aging British journalist Thomas Fowler, on assignment in French Vietnam, is the epitome of that blend of diffidence and arrogance, the latter politely sheathed by the former. Fowler has a cosy live-in lover, Phuong, a moderate opium dependency, and no desire to return to the UK, to his bitter Anglican wife who refuses him a divorce. At a club with Phuong, he meets Alden Pyle, the "quiet American" of the title, a young, handsome Harvard-grad supposedly in Vietnam on a non-military mission. In fact, Pyle is an OSS agent provocateur, a liaison to the rogue general Trinh Minh The, whom Pyle's superiors perceive as an effective "Third Force" in the war between the French colonialists and the 'communist' Viet Minh. Fowler and Pyle become rivals for 'possession' of Phuong. And that's all I mean to reveal of the plot! This 'triangle of passion' is the skeleton of the novel, but it's Greene's depiction of Alden Pyle that sustains the exceptional interest of the book. Pyle is seemingly a naive idealist, innocent, brash, firmly convinced of the good intentions of his country, committed to the political philosophy of York Harding (an imaginary scholar). There are rumors that Pyle's persona was based on the real-life American Edward Lansdale, a CIA 'counter-insurgency expert' whose interventions in Vietnam, Cuba, and elsewhere qualify him as one of the colorful scoundrels of the 20th C. In any case, Pyle's idealism is of the sort that accommodates slaughter of innocents. To put it bluntly, he's a terrorist, but "our" terrorist. The gauze that separates "idealism" from ideological fanaticism is very thin in Pyle. But Graham Greene is not merely depicting one plausible malefactor -- one who can smile and smile and yet be a villain. Pyle is not only a 'quiet' American; he's an archetypal American, a synecdoche of America as Greene perceived it. "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," Fowler says about Pyle; Greene is saying the same about America: "I never knew a People who had better motives for all the catastrophes they caused." Remember that Greene wrote this book before 1955, when it was published, and therefore before the French debacle at Dien Biên Phu. But it reveals what everybody except the American public knew: that America was waiting in the wings to take over the anti-communist crusade in 'Indochina'. Pyle describes explicitly to Fowler what later would be called the "Domino Theory". Pyle's utter inability to grasp the mentality of the Vietnamese would become exactly what led to the inability of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon to comprehend why America could only 'win' a war in Vietnam by "turning it into a parking lot". In effect, Graham Greene was the most prescient writer since Nostradamus! This little novel is such an accurate prophecy of the American calamity in Vietnam a decade later that, if it had been read carefully in Washington, it might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. ## Frequently Bought Together - The Quiet American - Our Man In Havana --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.no/products/1234839-the-quiet-american-penguin-classics-deluxe-edition](https://www.desertcart.no/products/1234839-the-quiet-american-penguin-classics-deluxe-edition) --- *Product available on Desertcart Norway* *Store origin: NO* *Last updated: 2026-10-27*