I'm a big fan of [author:Graham Greene|2533] but this nonfiction account of his journey through Mexico shortly before the beginning of World War II was largely disappointing. While it did show readers occasional glimpses of the wondrous beauty of Mexico that I encountered during the months that I spent there, Greene's own attitudes tended to sour his account of his journey. I joked early on while reading this that I was 'stunned by how much Greene absolutely loathes everything about Mexico. The streets are muddy. the houses are dirty. The food is repellent. The view from the train is a "melancholy plain that lay like lead under the rainclouds". I get the feeling that his editor sent him to Mexico against his wishes when he really wanted to be assigned to the Paris desk.' After finishing it, I don't think that I was far off of the mark. His attitudes were very colonial, bordering on racist. He judged everyone based on their ancestry and if they were Mexican, he usually found them wanting.
Another issue I had with his account is his clear bias where religion is concerned. Greene converted to Catholicism when he married and clearly took his conversion seriously. At the time of his journey, the Catholic church was outlawed in Mexico and priests were forbidden from practicing their rites. Some who continued to practice were executed. To Greene, all priests were kindly souls along the lines of Spencer Tracy's Father Flanagan, who learned the languages of the natives and lived lives of service and austerity. Anyone who has seen the tremendous gold inside some massive Mexican cathedrals, built by the slave labor of Indians, knows that there was more to the church's activities than just love and sacrifice.
I'm glad I had the chance to read this book. It gave me the opportunity to see Mexico through different eyes at a different time, something that is always a learning experience.
My thanks to RJ, Nancy, Robert and all the good folks at The Literary Darkness reading group for introducing me to this and many other examples of literary dark fiction. There is no other group at Goodreads as capable of picking apart a book and helping readers glean from it all they can. ( )

After reading "the Power and the Glory", I read this book. I had no idea there was a connection between the two (except the author of course). The difficulty was that I constantly was under the impression of reading fiction. It is in some ways similar to "the Power and the Glory". The book was very well written and interresting.

The problem I had with it was the racism. I know from another book "the Human Factor" that Graham Greene changed his opinion about race radically. This is why I could forgive him for that. ( )

Greene's contempt for everyone he meets, and his condescension towards Mexicans in particular, was getting on my nerves, and I finally gave up when I got to this description of Mexican food (particularly galling coming from a Briton in the 1930s—what was he comparing it to, kidney pies and fish n' chips?):

"Lunch was awful: like the food you eat in a dream, tasteless in a positive way, so that the very absence of taste is repellent. All Mexican food is like that: if it isn’t hot with sauces, it’s nothing at all, just a multitude of plates planked down on the table simultaneously, so that five are getting cold while you eat the sixth; pieces of anonymous meat, a plate of beans, fish from which the taste of the sea has long been squeezed away, rice mixed with what look like grubs—perhaps they are grubs—a salad (dangerous, you are always warned, and for a long while you heed the warning), a little heap of bones and skin they call a chicken—the parade of cooling dishes goes endlessly on to the table edge. After a while your palate loses all discrimination; hunger conquers; you begin in a dim way even to look forward to your meal. I suppose if you live long enough in Mexico you begin to write like Miss Frances Toor—“Mexican cooking appeals to the eye as well as to the palate.” (It is all a hideous red and yellow, green and brown, like art needlework and the sort of cushions popular among decayed gentlewomen in Cotswold teashops.)"

K-1

I love Greene's prose, but he seems like the kind of guy who'd order shepard's pie using church Latin in the middle of nowhere Tabasco and then be disappointed when brought tamales. ( )