Books in Review
Our Man in Havana was conceived when
Alberto Cavalcanti, a Brazilian film direc-
tor, asked Greene to write a film outline,
way before the Cuban Revolution. Our Man
in Havana satirizes “Britain’s self-delusion
about its standing in the world, the inept-
ness of government departments, and the
cover-ups they concoct to distract from
their cock-ups.”
According to Hull, British writer Gra-
ham Greene’s unplanned visit to Havana
inspired him “to resurrect a decade-old
outline for an espionage story.” Hull’s book
has a greater scope than the title might
suggest, tracing the historical context of
the tensions between East and West, love,
capitalism, and the Cuban Missile Crisis,
inter alia. Greene’s biography provides Hull
with a great opportunity to explore Cuba’s
history during the 1950s and 1960s and the
position of British intelligence on the island
in sections such as “Down in Havana” and
“Our Arms in Havana.”
Hull starts out by giving background
information on Greene’s life, as the author
drew upon his work as an MI6 officer in
Sierra Leone and London to inspire his
fictional world. Although Hull sometimes
runs the risk of giving too many details
of Greene’s biography, this account shows
how the historical context gives Greene’s
novel meaning and illustrates how the bor-
der between reality and fiction is blurred
through the novel’s many kernels of his-
torical fact. The novel’s protagonist, James
Wormold, and his espio-
nage world do not resemble
Ian Fleming’s well-known
“shaken-not-stirred” and
flawless James Bond but
more truthfully mimics
spy agents during wartime:
“farcical” and “funny.”
Hull adeptly fleshes out
points of connection that
often go unacknowledged.
He draws attention to Our
Man in Havana’s protago-
nist, who feeds his superi-
ors with false reports and
actual events such as the invasion of Iraq
that was based on subsources, fabrication,
and falsehood. From there, Hull sheds light
on decisions that have been marked with
massive mistakes. At the end, Greene and
later Hull leave us with a fundamental ques-
tion: What would we prefer to believe?
The data for this book was compiled
from an extensive range of archival investi-
gation and a thorough analysis of Greene’s
biography and other works. From there,
Hull narrates the story behind the novel of
a famous writer who suffered from manic
depression, focusing on historical anglo-
American and Latin American relationships.
Christopher Hull’s latest book can pro-
ductively appeal to researchers and students
working on Graham Greene’s life and works
as well as to those studying British policies
in Cuba.
Toloo Riazi
University of California, Santa BarbaraAdam Ehrlich Sachs
The Organs of SenseNew York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019.
240 pages.Commencing Leaving the Atocha Station
with a sharp gesture, novelist Ben Lern-
er puts all his narrative and descriptive
responsibilities aside, in favor of a very
funny use of vernacular language, when his
protagonist follows a man carefully until
the moment where the lat-
ter “totally lost his shit.”
Lerner so clearly flags his
shirking of the demands
ordinarily placed on a nov-
elist that the book as a
whole comes alive and for
its remainder doesn’t settle
for anything less.
Adam Ehrlich Sachs in
his new book, The Organs
of Sense, his debut as a nov-
elist, does something simi-
lar. However, where Lerner
is content with giving hisreader one heads-up at the very beginning,
Ehrlich Sachs indulges in driving his story
off a narrative cliff again and again. Such
detours go back to the substantial conceit
of Erlich Sachs’s book, as The Organs of
Sense stages a fictional encounter between
the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
portrayed at the age of nineteen, and a mys-
terious, blind astronomer, both anticipating
an eclipse predicted by the latter to take
place at noon, June 30, 1666. Relentlessly,
the fabric of narrative gets cut off in this
mise-en-scène wherein, crucially, Leibniz is
the auditor of fiction.
The Organs of Sense is peppered with
comic sequences wherein a particular word
or phrase is robbed of its meaning by
repetition; simultaneously, these segments
are importantly put before the philoso-
pher Leibniz at an impressionable age. A
sculptor ecstatically confident at creating
a perfect model of a human head (“I can
make that head. I can make that head. I
can actually make that head!”), an emperor
quizzing the agent who purchases art for
him about the fish on a particular painting,
or the astronomer, celebrating the appear-
ance of a new star in the night sky, going
out in the streets of Prague to tie into knots
the Aristotelians who thought that celestial
bodies were eternal—these are but a few
examples of how Ehrlich Sachs disrupts
important assumptions involved in reading
a contemporary novel.
So unlike the extremely self-aware and
postmodern Lerner, Ehrlich Sachs, with
his total commitment to completing every
single skit, resembles older writing—bawdy
tales from Gogol’s Dead Souls o r R a b e l a i s’s
Gargantua and Pantagruel—and thus dis-
plays a modern attitude. Indeed, this motif
is pursued so consistently that The Organs of
Sense is something halfway between a novel
and a piece of conceptual art.
There is much here to remind us of
Ehrlich Sachs’s earlier collection of “sto-
ries, parables and problems,” the fantasti-
cally funny Inherited Disorders. Yet the most
important connecting motif is the botched
attempts, intellectual or violent, between110 W LT SUMMER 2019