Travels with My Aunt (1969) is a novel written by English author Graham Greene. The novel follows the travels of Henry Pulling, a retired bank manager, and his eccentric Aunt Augusta as they find their way across Europe, and eventually even further afield. Aunt Augusta pulls Henry away from his quiet suburban existence into a world of adventure, crime and the highly unconventional details of her past.
Rather tawdry.
Got two-thirds of the way through this one and then quit. Greene tries to be funny and hip and he flops. He perversely chooses as his protagonist the most boring character he can imagine, and then tries to correct this by pairing him up with an Aunt who is more erratic than intriguing. In a writer who was quicker with laugh-out-loud observations, this might still work, but Greene just hopes that by throwing in references to marijuana and foreigners he can get by on quirk. Skip this one.
A retired bank manager attends his mother's funeral only to find out he has an aunt he's never known and the woman he thought was his mother may not actually have been his biological mother.
This is a fairly spare, light-hearted novel. Despite learning some pretty earth-shattering news about what he'd always believed, the gravity of it hardly fizzes on him. He is curious about getting to know his aunt a little better and finding out more regarding his mother and his father--the latter whom he hardly knew at all. So, the by-the-rules bank manager, whose only interest in life now is dahlias, decides to do some travelling with his free-spirited, anything-goes aunt.
It's not that I didn't enjoy the novel, but there isn't really a lot to recommend it. There are a few great lines and pieces of wisdom--what Graham Greene novel doesn't have that--but the characters are pretty …
A retired bank manager attends his mother's funeral only to find out he has an aunt he's never known and the woman he thought was his mother may not actually have been his biological mother.
This is a fairly spare, light-hearted novel. Despite learning some pretty earth-shattering news about what he'd always believed, the gravity of it hardly fizzes on him. He is curious about getting to know his aunt a little better and finding out more regarding his mother and his father--the latter whom he hardly knew at all. So, the by-the-rules bank manager, whose only interest in life now is dahlias, decides to do some travelling with his free-spirited, anything-goes aunt.
It's not that I didn't enjoy the novel, but there isn't really a lot to recommend it. There are a few great lines and pieces of wisdom--what Graham Greene novel doesn't have that--but the characters are pretty thin and the story doesn't have much to it. It's okay for people who just want something quick and easy without much thinking, but it isn't in the same league as The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American, A Burnt-Out Case, The End of the Affair, or The Power and the Glory.
