The Man Within My Head

Starred review from November 28, 2011
Graham Greene isn’t the man essayist and novelist Iyer (Sun After Dark) would choose to take up residence in his head—“I would most likely fasten on someone more dashing, more decisive, less unsettled”—but it’s his lifelong fascination with Greene that fuels this deeply personal journey that crisscrosses the world and his own past. As much a catalogue of Iyer’s extensive travels as a musing on Greene’s themes of foreignness, displacedness, and otherness, the text moves seamlessly between Iyer’s days as a schoolboy in England and adventures in Bolivia, Ethiopia, and Cuba. For Iyer—who was born in England to India-born parents, moved to California at eight, but soon returned to the U.K. for boarding school—Greene’s oft-repeated theme of the foreigner resonates deeply. Like an “adopted parent,” Greene is forever by his side: a hotel in Saigon reminds him of The Quiet American, a seminal text for Iyer; his first trip to Cuba brings to mind the author; and even Iyer’s old Oxford neighborhood is reminiscent of Greene, as his ex-wife lived nearby. As he explores his obsession, Iyer cautiously peels back the layers of his relationship with his own father, a brilliant philosopher whose belief in mysticism Iyer did not share. In the hands of a lesser writer, the dueling father figures would dissolve into melodrama, but Iyer weaves them brilliantly, reminding us that “we run from who we are.., only to discover, of course, that that is precisely what we can never put behind us.”

December 1, 2011
Novelist, essayist and travel writer Iyer (The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, 2008, etc.) examines his life through the lens of his lifetime preoccupation with the writing of Graham Greene. Greene's The Quiet American epitomizes for the author some of the major themes of his life: "foreignness, displacedness…innocence, chivalry." Greene's book, which takes place in Saigon during the buildup to the Vietnamese war, describes how the rivalry between a cynical British diplomat and the eponymous naïve American over a Vietnamese woman plays out on the larger stage of imperial politics. Iyer compares his own sense of divided identity to characters in Greene's book. "I went back and forth, in my life and then my head," he writes, "between unquiet Englishmen who were often more compassionate than they let on and quiet Americans who were not quite so innocent as they liked to seem." Though of Indian descent, Iyer was born in England, where he attended Eton and then Oxford. His father had left India and settled at Oxford, where he taught for eight years before moving to California to continue his brilliant academic career. The author is a wonderful wordsmith, and he provides engaging stories: about the fires that twice burned down his family's homes in Santa Barbara, landing in Sri Lanka in 2006 amid a violent upsurge while on assignment to write a travel piece on Marco Polo, his school days at Eton being trained to run an empire that no longer existed. Unfortunately, the disconnected chronology may leave many readers adrift. Those unfamiliar with the writings of either Greene or Iyer may have trouble following the thread of this memoir.

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August 1, 2011

Having taken us around the world in books like The Open Road and essays in venues like the New York Review of Books, Iyer now goes on an inner journey, showing us how he was profoundly influenced by Graham Greene while acknowledging the less clear influence of his father. For the intellectually hungry; with a six-city tour.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2011
It may be that Iyer's beautifully contoured sentences embody all the landscapes he's absorbed as he's traveled the world, pen in hand. Iyer is always present in his celebrated books (The Open Road, 2008), but never to the extent he is here in this captivating memoir of an unsought, often unnerving affinity. As he recounts indelible moments in his wandering, multicultural life and contemplates solitude and family, travel in difficult and impoverished countries, and passionate literary immersions, Iyer painstakingly maps his obsession with writer Graham Greene. Why has Greene lived vividly inside him? Iyer offers a unique perspective on Greene's groundbreaking books and empathically renders Greene's contrariness, prescience, covert compassion, and fascinating life. He concludes, At heart, he offered me a way of looking at things, and the way one looked became a kind of theology. Ultimately, Iyer's profound inquiry leads him to a fresh elucidation of his feelings for his late philosopher father. Iyer's deep-diving expedition also illuminates the mystery and spirit of the literary imperative: A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the world. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)