I spent more time than was strictly necessary in the plush…

““I spent more time than was strictly necessary in the plush red corridors of the Hotel Metropole in Hanoi. For some reason, I had convinced myself that I needed to see the inside of suite 228, which was otherwise referred to in the voluminous hotel literature as "the Graham Greene Suite." Greene, whom I had been mildly fixated on for some time, had stayed there during the fifties. I was staying next door in suite 226, and after several days of wondering how I was going to get into his room, I noticed the maid's cart outside. When she finally ducked out to refill her stash of aloe shampoo and little almond soaps, I slipped through the half-opened door. Inside was a bare mahogany desk, a brass lamp, a king-size bed with a modern, striped duvet, and several spindly French sofas, also striped. I couldn't help feeling vastly let down. The setting was devoid of both Greene's seediness - he later regretted popularising the word "seedy" - and his elegance, which should not, of course, have come as a surprise. The Metropole was gutted after the war and rebuilt. And even if it hadn't been, I knew from experience that this sort of literary pilgrimage is always anticlimactic: the writer is dead and what remains of him is in his books.””

— Katie Roiphe