Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] I thought of Mr Visconti dancing with my aunt in the reception room of a brothel behind the Messagero after swindling the Vatican and the King of Saudi Arabia and leaving a wide trail of damage behind him in the banks of Italy. Was the secret of lasting youth known only to the criminal mind?"

I am quite ambivalent about Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt (1969): on the one hand novels that are funny in a demented way are one of my favorite genres. Alas, on the other hand, Mr. Greene's novel serves as a vehicle to tell a huge number of loosely connected stories, which - in turn - happens to be one of my least favorite genres. This balances out to a marginally positive recommendation based on various pearls of wisdom scattered throughout the text and some hilarious scenes.

The beginning sentence of the novel neatly sets up the plot:

"I met my Aunt Augusta for the first time in more than half a century at my mother's funeral."

Immediately after the funeral, Aunt Augusta invites Henry, the narrator and a retired banking executive, for drinks. She tells him that he is not his mother's son, but rather a product of his father's affair. And so begins their friendship, of a sixty-something man with his seventy-something aunt. They could not be less alike. While Henry is a quintessential banking executive whose life is utterly organized, predictable, and boring, Aunt Augusta has a strong streak of anarchy in her, lives to travel, and knows some very, very, very strange people. She manages to infect Henry with her carefree attitude to life and they begin traveling together.

Their travels begin modestly, with a Brighton outing, but the range escalates to Paris, Boulogne, then on the Orient Express to Istanbul, and finally Argentina and Paraguay. The set of characters is even more impressive: first of all, there is Wordsworth, a Sierra Leone-born man, ostensibly Aunt Augusta's valet but in fact a man who attends to all her wants, and the mysterious and powerful persona of Mr. Visconti. My favorite character is Tooley, a very young woman whom Henry meets on the Orient Express. They smoke pot and she tells him about her life tribulations and about her father, a CIA operative.

The avalanche of colorful stories assaults the reader with the richness of tantalizing details: as an example, just on one page the author mentions marijuana and acid experiences, CIA, and the fear of castration. Future is being told from tea leaves, we learn about a porn movie theater in Havana, we are told about confession taken by a fake priest during World War II, and a suitcase stuffed with cash is toted across various borders. Tooley's father keeps a detailed record of his daily urinations and a character is arrested for using a wrong-colored handkerchief to blow his nose. We have a whirlwind of fast-changing locales in Europe, Asia, and South America, so the novel may even be viewed as a travelogue of sorts.

I have been totally exhausted and frankly bored by this maelstrom of stories, but it is quite likely that other readers will find the novel exhilarating. What redeems the book for me are the occasional tasty nuggets of literary brilliance and astute observations like

"Luckily in middle age pleasure begins, pleasure in love, in wine, in food. Only the taste of poetry flags a little [...] Lovemaking too provides as a rule a more prolonged and varied pleasure after forty-five."

True! Alas, the express train of my life left the station called "Middle Age" many years ago.

Two and three quarter stars.

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