The Night Manager - John le Carré

Like with a little black dress, I guess you can never go wrong with a vintage le Carré. And to think of the snobbish look of our librarian when I donated my copy of The Russia House...

For me The Night Manager ranks a bit below Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy and Agent Running in the Field, but it remains a heck of a story. The troubled Pine is one of the most entertaining spies (well, is he a spy or a volunteer?!?) that I've ever come across, and seeing him struggle with his own conscience is absolutely gripping. 

Yet, it's Roper that steals the show. A villain who is always in plain sight and at the centre of the action, not a Palpatine-like figure in the hazy background, he undoubtedly elevates the novel. 

And one is left to marvel at how well some of  le Carré's books - including this - have aged. 

Come Fossi Solo - Marco Magini

  

Again, as far as amateur authors go, Magini is good. Actually, this book, his first, is arguably much more impressive than Gli Ospiti. 

For once, I liked the characterization of the novel's one real-life character (Dražen Erdemović) better than that of the fictional characters (the judge and the former Dutch soldier with PTSD). The last of the three for me lacked depth and the judge simply reminded me of Spencer Tracy in Judgement at Nuremberg. 

Dražen, on the other hand, stole the show for me. Magini's ability to re-create his life and emotions is remarkable. Most of all, for me it served as a great stimulus to read up on what happened in the aftermath of Srebrenica, and the fact that he was the only one to serve time for the atrocities defies belief.

Fragrant Harbour – John Lanchester

A book that I got from the book swap shelf at Stratford Station – the only one I’ve ever managed to pick up from there, but it was worth it! I originally grabbed it for my mom, as she had liked Capital more than I did, and only read it after she did and because of her very strong recommendations.

Fragrant Harbour has many of the traits of the standard best-seller: an “unusual” love story, international intrigue, a look at the blurred lines between orgranized crime and top-level impresarios and plenty of others. The thing for me was that, being set in Hong Kong, it was both interesting from an historical point of view and very different from a standard best-seller.

Predictably, the book’s bottom line is that there are colonialists with a heart (and also a sense of humour and self-criticism) and entrepreneurs who are far from being evil capitalists. This is not exactly the most unusual of messages, but it is delivered with grace. And the appearance of Tom’s nephew is something that really makes one hopeful that good people can overcome drunken British hooligans…

With Capital I had the feeling that Lanchester could have made so much more given the rough material he had at his disposal, but I think that with Fragrant Harbour he managed to get the most out of his plot and research – or maybe I’m just way less familiar with Hong Kong that I am with London!

The Comedians – Graham Greene

I bonded with the former Registrar at LSE over our common love for literature – although, honestly, I was mostly listening to his suggestions rather than offering much of my own (with the exception of some tips on some Italian novels, at best). I remember telling him that I wished I could teach the Vietnam War by starting with a discussion of The Quiet American, and him saying that his favourite Graham Greene book was actually The Comedians. I can see where he was coming from (although this is not my favourite Greene novel – that’d probably be Our Man in Havana, at least at the time of writing).

In terms of white men trying to find their place in Latin America, I liked The Comedians a lot better than The Honorary Consul, and that’s probably because Haiti to me is much more exotic than Argentina and Paraguay. Also, the Live and Let Die-vibe of the book is truly excellent, as is the self-criticism of Mr Brown (who really reminded me of Rick in Casablanca). I just can’t understand how they managed to make an awful movie out of this book…

Now I think I’ll have to stop reading books by Greene, chiefly because I’ve read a few too many over the last couple of years and I am afraid I might be overdoing (my relationship with Ian McEwan serves as a serious warning here).

Oh, and whoever designed the back-cover of my Penguin edition is an absolute ass committed to spoiling the plot – bravo!

Taras Bulba – Nicolaj Gogol

I had to read some Gogol at some point. But seriously, what the hell?

Sure, I’m not Russian so I can’t understand, but I’m normally all up for epic stories of national courage (even Russian courage, in the case of Michael Strogoff…) but isn’t Taras Bulba (not written in italics because I’m referring to the character and not to the novel) a bit much?

Sure, your son has switched sides (a bit too easily also), but killing him in battle without feeling at least a wee bit emotional sounds, well, heartless. At a certain point even his comrades tell Taras that he might want to take it down a notch but he continues to be an almost perfect killing machine.

One would hope that at least while he’s being burned he would stop. But he doesn’t. He keeps on yelling at his Cossacks. A true leader. And possibly an idiot. 

Julian – Gore Vidal

It’s not like I haven’t read a book in three weeks (I wouldn’t dare!), I just didn’t update the blog because we had an action-packed few days in Italy collecting second-hand baby stuff and taking my wife’s growing belly on tour for one last time.

Julian is a book that my mom gave me some 15 years ago and that, like all good sons, I kindly ignored for as long as I could (that is until I realized that having loved Memoirs of Hadrian so much I would have at least “liked” Julian). And, much to everyone’s surprise, I did like it.

Despite the fact that the reader can perceive Gore Vidal’s massive ego even through pages that are meant to have been written almost 2000 years ago, the book has a number of things going for it: the triple narrator makes it more dynamic than Memoirs of Hadrian, the frequent digs at early Christianity are just so much more fun than the ones at contemporary Christianity (seriously, too easy and boring!), and the historical descriptions and not-so-obvious-yet-obvious facts (like that one at that point could become Roman emperor without ever having been to Rome) make it a very interesting read.

Yet, I like a time when man was at the centre of things, between the disappearance of the gods and the appearance of God, better than a time after the appearance of God during which the gods tried to regain their lost territory. So, ultimately, Julian is no match for Hadrian, at least for me. 

Master Georgie – Beryl Bainbridge

It’s always reassuring to know that, if I’m looking for a quick quality read, I can always find a book by Beryl Bainbridge (and all my key second-hand shops, Fopp, Books for Free etc. seem to have copies of them somehow). This one in particular was probably coming from Books for Free.

While I didn’t like it as much as An Awfully Big Adventure or Harriet Said… (which I’ve only just realized I never wrote about in this blog – silly me! As it’s an outstanding, thought-provoking and disturbing read) I still enjoyed Master Georgie. More than anything, I think Bainbridge deserves to be praised for looking at the Crimean War (a war about which I know next to nothing – in case anyone needed further proof that I’m a bad historian).

The one issue I had with this book, however, was that I found it rather “uneven”: of the six chapters narrated by three characters (but never by Georgie himself), Myrtle’s two are absolutely beautiful and touching (after all, Bainbridge has always been an absolute master at describing the lives of troubled girls with their hopes, fantasies, and realities), Pompey’s ones are cute and endearing in an Oliver Twistesque kind of way, but Potter’s ones are just a bit too plain (I do realize Bainbridge needed to have a more mature – although not necessarily reliable – narrator, in particular in Crimea, but I just didn’t find his chapters to be at the same level as the others’). 

Michael Strogoff – Jules Verne

My grandma taught me how to read when I was 4. By the time I was 5 I was a boring kid reading scientific publications on dinosaurs and wild animals. By the time I was 6 and in elementary school most people around me had also learned how to read, so I stopped and, essentially, didn’t open a book until I was 14.

Because of my long literature-free years, I am now often forced to embarrassingly catch up on books that I wish I had read in my early teens, like Michael Strogoff. I half-heartedly read 20.000 Leagues under the Sea when I was 12 (one of the few books that I was forced to read in that period and, because of the mood I was in, I think it’s best if I don’t write anything about how I felt towards Captain Nemo then), I later loved Around the World in 80 Days, but Michael Strogoff was the Jules Verne book that intrigued me the most (that said, I managed to postpone reading it until now although I had asked for it as a Christmas present probably 10 years ago).

It was a delightful read despite the fact that, more than Around the World in 80 Days, the novel is so extremely dated (its national stereotypes, its depiction of women, nationalism, courage, morality etc.) – but my edition still had the old 19^th century illustrations which made me tingly inside, and I must say I actually had goosebumps when Michael carries Nadja towards Irkutsk. It was also interesting to look at how quickly each event was described: with one hit Michael kills a bear, with one jump he runs away and so on and so forth – all those actions are described in one quick line, whereas in a 20^th century adventure they would probably last for a few epic pages.

Also, I’ve probably loved the book because it finally gave me an idea of the geography of some of those mysterious territories in the top-right corner of the Risk board…

La Pelle – Curzio Malaparte

There is an autograph in my copy of Malaparte’s masterpiece. Not his, it’s actually John Mayall. Random, I know, but after a concert at Ronnie Scott’s this was the only thing I had that could be autographed by the living legend.

This is a book about, well, not exactly Fascism, but the effects of the Second World War and the fight alongside the Americans against Fascism. The funny thing, however, is that Malaparte himself – a wild anarchic character – was a Fascist of the first hour before becoming disillusioned with the regime.

This is, essentially, a book about suffering. About a country that has been “erased like a blackboard, rebuilt erased again” (thanks James Earl Jones) and is written by someone who, quite clearly, still loves it and, most of all, still loves its people. It’s written with a piercing style that shows the sorrow of a man for the plague that has hit society around him and who has given up on the souls of his people and can only hope that they will manage to save their skin (“la pelle”). 

1984 – George Orwell

The mother of all dystopian novels. The ministries, doublethink, revolution, the party, Big Brother, spies, mice, interrogations, Victory Gin – it’s all so terrifying. And yet, to me, it’s all a bit much (probably that's because, for my Ph.D., I spent 3 years looking at the nature of totalitariansim). I wonder whether Orwell actually believed all this (or part of it) would have happened.

I am glad I’ve read this book, but I can’t say that I liked it and I actually don’t have any particularly insightful comment to add other than: it’s all just a bit too much. 

The Tin Drum – Günter Grass

One of the greatest novels I’ve ever read. Too bad it’s one book too long (I didn’t really see much of a point in the chapters on the early Cold War in Europe, probably because I find that to be a rather boring period).

Personally, I think the most significant feature of the novel is the self-portrayal of the narrator, Oskar, a character the reader initially wants to hug and cuddle, and later ends up distrusting and stepping away from. Oskar is simultaneously acute enough to decide to stop growing when he is a 3-year old disgusted by the world, and selfishly childish enough to cause the death of his two potential fathers. When I came to the realization he was responsible for the two deaths (something that I would have probably denied, had it not been for the fact that Oskar highlights it, at times with remorse, at times as a matter of fact) I was almost in tears.

Because of its size, and despite its undeniable qualities, this is a book that I had to read over the span of a week. Prolonging the anxiety for that long was really rather intense and this was a book that ended up affecting my mood throughout those days.

Il Sistema Periodico – Primo Levi

 

One of the books I’ve read to distract myself as I was writing my Ph.D. thesis on Italian Fascism while still feeling like I was doing some academic work (I might have even thrown a couple of cheeky references to this collection of short stories for good measure).

Having only read works by Levi that had been marked by the Holocaust, it was rather refreshing to read stories about Levi’s life before WWII, finding even a trace of humour every now and then – something so sadly absent in most of his books.

I am not a fan of short stories, I never have enough time to be drawn into them, and I am by no means a scientist (like Levi was, and he titled every short story in this collection with the name of an element on the periodic table) so I think I missed a number of the book’s subtleties. Still, I liked it nonetheless.

Uomini e No – Elio Vittorini

Italian youth is extremely politicized. Even in the early 2000s most of our weekends were spent yelling “Fascista”, or “Comunista”, with the suffix “di merda” to kids across the street (I was on the yelling end of the earlier, and, quite proudly, on the receiving end of the latter). When interviewed about the great merits of Fascism, kids dressed in tight black jackets and wearing knee-high boots would point out that “when he was around” trains were leaving on time, swamps were being reclaimed, and the Pope came to recognize the Italian state (yay!).

Nobody ever pointed out that, had it not been for Fascism, we would have never had Resistance literature, Beppe Fenoglio, and Elio Vittorini. Yes, their style was crude, the pages that described the lull between battles often more interesting than the ones about their fights, and the number of cigarettes their main characters would smoke was simply staggering. Yet, these books are possibly the best Italian novels of the 20^th century, and Uomini e No is amongst the finest of them all.

The book was written before the end of the war, and the fact that its main character – of whom we only know the battle-name “Enne 2” – dies but makes a new recruit minutes before being killed by the Fascists is a message of hope that was probably much needed at that point in time. Then again, for much that I love them, I would trade Fenoglio and Vittorini for an extra 20 years of democracy and, possibly, one fewer ill-conceived entry into a World War.

For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway

When I was 16 I thought that Hemingway was the greatest writer to have ever lived. I had read most of his seminal books, but I hadn’t read For Whom the Bell Tolls until earlier this year.

Now I no longer think that he is the greatest writer in history. At times I even ask myself whether he was just a man who cared about his drinks and his guns and, ultimately, not much about his women. Probably the truth is somewhere in the middle: one of the best writers of his generation despite his many personal flaws.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a great read, but the self-censorship and the literary translation of Spanish expressions butchers that beautiful language. And the figure of the hero with no fear seems a bit excessive in the era of The Dark Knight.

Also, every time I read something by Hemingway or Orwell about the Spanish Civil War, I think of the old general of the International Brigades who, when asked about the contributions of the two writers to the war effort, simply answered “Fucking tourists”.