I ordered this on a whim from Kindle. The Trumps of course are not interesting in and of themselves, they are rather like second-rate characters from a TV soap, but this writer did nothing to make me want to read about them, and I ditched it early.\u00a0 She comes from Vanity Fair<\/em> which has of late also become strangely dull.\u00a0 Come back Graydon Carter, all is forgiven.\u00a0\u00a0 We needed your relentless hatred of the orange monster.<\/p>\n I was wondering why I wasn\u2019t so knocked out by this when the denouement blew me away.\u00a0 He is seriously good.\u00a0 Once again weather provides the setting.\u00a0 This time Paris in the dead days of August.\u00a0 Hot and oppressive, waiting for a thunderstorm to clear the air.\u00a0\u00a0 This is about a serial killer, and he comes into the story after five murders!\u00a0\u00a0 Who else would ever do that?\u00a0 Such confidence he has.<\/p>\n Confined to bed for twenty four hours I lashed into Le Carr\u00e9, beginning with this his first novel, which is at least half a detective story and introduces the delightful character of George Smiley, who collaborates with Mendel to solve the mystery of the sudden suicide of Fennan.\u00a0 Also appearing for the first time is the sinister Munch.\u00a0 And also for the first time the name Le Carr\u00e9.\u00a0 \u201cWhen people press me, I say, I saw the name on a shop front from the top of a London bus.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t.\u00a0 I just don\u2019t know.\u00a0 But never trust a novelist when he tells you the truth.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 I enjoyed it so much I resolved to re-read the Smiley novels in order.<\/p>\n After twenty four hours I was done with the first two and was forced to download the next.\u00a0 This one is set at Carne public school and features the struggle between town and gown when vile things break out in this ancient public school.\u00a0 For a short time Le Carr\u00e9 even taught at Eton, and of the masters he says \u201cI loathed them, and I loathed their grotesque allegiances most of all.\u00a0 To this day, I can find no forgiveness for their terrible abuse of the charges entrusted to them.\u201d<\/p>\n I was forced to download this since I thought I had reread it recently, but turns out I hadn\u2019t.\u00a0 Of course I\u2019d seen the excellent movie again.\u00a0 I\u2019m glad I did, because I really liked it after all these years.\u00a0 Intriguing to get back into that world of Checkpoint Charlie, and the Munt puzzle which he brilliantly revisits in his latest A Legacy of Spies,<\/em> which I re-read with delight a month ago for no better reason than it looked fun in paperback at Vromans. \u00a0\u00a0And it was.<\/p>\n This did pose a dilemma as I have<\/em> read it recently, but I determined to continue in my quest and again I was rewarded.\u00a0\u00a0 He was of course panned for this, immediately after his grand success with the previous novel.\u00a0 It reminded me that the only thing I learned from studying literature at Cambridge is that it is almost always pointless reading any criticism.\u00a0 Most of it is penis envy, and though the envy may be big, the penis is tiny.\u00a0\u00a0 JLC meant it as a corrective to the romantic view of the Circus from his big suprising hit novel, a more accurate portrayal of the petty world of British intrigue and the seedy and sordid world of spying.\u00a0 Perhaps that view did not accord with the times.\u00a0 Anyway, it is well worth the trip.\u00a0 So that\u2019s the fourth of the Smiley novels and the larger, more famous works lie ahead.<\/p>\n However I have decided to put re-reading them all on hold, there are just too many good new things to read on my shelf this summer. \u00a0\u00a0Perhaps on my book tour\u2026<\/p>\n I had trouble sticking with this one.\u00a0\u00a0 It reminded me of the world of The French Lieutenant\u2019s Woman, <\/em>but I kept being confused by the period setting, and the intrusion of things like the London Underground, cameras and so on into the world of the 1890\u2019s.\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure I care enough to stick with it, but it\u2019s the sort of thing I could pick up later and enjoy.\u00a0\u00a0 That\u2019s me not it.<\/p>\n And despite all my ravings about Saul Bellow I kept finding myself putting this down.\u00a0\u00a0 Why?<\/p>\n Is it me, or can you smell gas?<\/em><\/p>\n I was quite enjoying this Indonesian novel.\u00a0 Mainly a story of a dick, I may return to it.<\/p>\n Sometimes one overlooks the obvious.\u00a0\u00a0 There is an excellent reason Agatha is the best read author in the world, she is actually very readable.\u00a0 This short novel, which eventually even includes Miss Marple at the end, helping with the denouement, is narrated by a brother in a dry, ironic style. He and his sister retreat for peace and quiet, and physical recovery into the simple peace and quiet of the English countryside where, of course, they find anything but and become involved in a murder mystery,\u00a0 a who-dunit about a poison pen letter writer.\u00a0 Utterly pleasurable.<\/p>\n The secret of Simenon is women.\u00a0\u00a0 He knows them.\u00a0\u00a0 Thoroughly.\u00a0 He studies them.\u00a0\u00a0 He understands them.\u00a0 He sees their sorrows.\u00a0 He understands their heart aches.\u00a0 Their betrayals.\u00a0 Their sadness at growing old.\u00a0 Their power over men.\u00a0\u00a0 Their hanging on to old illusions when their men have passed their sell-by date.\u00a0 And of course in Madame Maigret he has created the ideal companion.\u00a0 One who never complains or demands his time.\u00a0 Who cooks at the drop of a hat, who even tries not to breathe when she has toothache so as not to disturb him.\u00a0\u00a0 Of course she is the least real of all his women.\u00a0 It\u2019s the sadness, and the drinking and the violence against women he perceives, because he was a lover of women.\u00a0\u00a0 Thousands.\u00a0 A daily seduction was as essential to him as writing.\u00a0 And he is not a good looking guy.\u00a0 But women trust him and perk up when they see him like they do for Maigret, the ideal observer, who just smokes his pipe and says little until the whole crime falls into place.\u00a0\u00a0 Sometimes even in a dream.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This is a faultless Maigret which includes excellent examples of all this.<\/p>\n The most brilliant take-down of the tyrant in the white house without a single mention of his name.\u00a0\u00a0 Stephen examines tyrants in Shakespeare history plays and what makes them tyrannous and how they grow into tyranny.\u00a0 Richard 111, Macbeth, Lear, and Coriolanus.\u00a0 Madness and megalomania leads them all down a path that seems so familiar from today\u2019s headlines.\u00a0\u00a0 A fascinating and brilliant read.\u00a0 And you can be sure one illiterate traitor won\u2019t be able to read it\u2026<\/p>\n A brilliant novel, exquisitely written.\u00a0 A short return to the scene in 1983 after the long and classic series of novels A Dance to the Music of Time.\u00a0 I felt it was so wonderfully written and constructed with his characters scenes constantly illuminated by the hilarious comments of the off-stage narrator.\u00a0 I thought it might make a play and I wanted to read it again.\u00a0 I found a first edition somewhere on my travels.\u00a0 It made me buy the first of his twelve volume epic classic: A Dance to the Music of Time, and eventually the whole set.\u00a0\u00a0 See July.<\/p>\n An essential gallop through the exciting and brave life of one of the most remarkable men in history.\u00a0 And one of the greatest exponents of English prose.\u00a0 Nicely told by Paul Johnson.\u00a0 He was utterly fearless and seemed to actually enjoy being shot at\u2026 Things I picked up:\u00a0 Hitler loved whistling, Churchill hated it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He was fencing champion at Harrow school.<\/p>\n Tom Hanks has no business being this uncommonly good at the short story.\u00a0 Is there nothing he cannot do?<\/p>\n A book of very accomplished parts.\u00a0 Fine writing, good characters, why does it not all then come together in triumph?\u00a0 I think he has chosen a very difficult way to tell the story. It\u2019s hard to tell a love story backwards and then only learn about it and the meaning and depth of it from the older eyes of the offspring.\u00a0 It involves the world of secrecy.\u00a0 Might have been better chronologically.<\/p>\n Fifties pot-boiler, set around Monte Carlo and some lessons about wealth.\u00a0 A little too over evident on second reading.<\/p>\n I missed him.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t find him in the book.\u00a0 It read like his life was sad.\u00a0 It was far from sad. It made me want to try and write something about him, a little longer than the final chapter I wrote on him in my Sortabiography, to discover for myself what I mean instinctively about his absence from these pages.\u00a0 It\u2019s not the Final Chapter of my book but it was the last chapter I wrote because I kept postponing it, knowing I must because I owed it to him, to recall him, in all his heart warming funny, sweet affectionate ways, but I was avoiding it for the longest time, dreading facing the reality of his loss. So maybe I will have a go or maybe that Chapter does it.\u00a0\u00a0 This is a perfectly fine canter through his life, but the essence is not there for me.<\/p>\n Loved her, hated him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Born Trump \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Emily Jane Fox I ordered this on a whim from Kindle. The Trumps of course are not interesting in and of themselves, they are rather like second-rate characters from a TV soap, but this writer did nothing to make me want to read about them, and I ditched it early.\u00a0 She […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=721"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":722,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions\/722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Maigret Sets a Trap\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Georges Simenon<\/h2>\n
Call for the Dead\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 John Le Carr\u00e9<\/h2>\n
A Murder of Quality\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 John Le Carr\u00e9<\/h2>\n
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.\u00a0 John Le Carr\u00e9<\/h2>\n
The Looking Glass War\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 John Le Carr\u00e9<\/h2>\n
The Essex Serpent\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Sarah Perry<\/h2>\n
Seize the Day\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Saul Bellow<\/h2>\n
Vengeance is Mine, All Others pay cash\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Eka Kurniawan<\/h2>\n
The Moving Finger\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Agatha Christie<\/h2>\n
Maigret\u2019s Failure\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Georges Simenon<\/h2>\n
Tyrant\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Stephen Greenblatt<\/h2>\n
How the Wheel becomes it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Anthony Powell<\/h2>\n
Churchill\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Paul Johnson<\/h2>\n
May<\/u><\/strong><\/h3>\n
Uncommon Type\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Tom Hanks<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
Warlight\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Michael Ondaatje<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
Loser takes all\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Graham Greene<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
Robin\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 David Itzkoff<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
Crime and Punishment \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Fyodor Dostoevsky.<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n