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Biography & Autobiograph Politic Nonfictio HTML:â??Recounted with the storytelling Ă©lan of a master raconteur â?? by turns dramatic and funny, charming, tart and melancholy.â? -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times The New York Times bestselling memoir from John le CarrĂ©, the legendary author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; and The Night Manager, now an Emmy-nominated television series starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie. From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le CarrĂ© has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le CarrĂ© is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire or the opening bars of Beethovenâ??s Fifth; visiting Rwandaâ??s museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide; celebrating New Yearâ??s Eve 1982 with Yasser Arafat and his high command; interviewing a German woman terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev; listening to the wisdoms of the great physicist, dissident, and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov; meeting with two former heads of the KGB; watching Alec Guinness prepare for his role as George Smiley in the legendary BBC TV adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smileyâ??s People; or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in The Constant Gardener, le CarrĂ© endows each happening with vividness and humor, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood. Best of all, le CarrĂ© gives us a glimpse of a writerâ??s journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life… (more)
User reviews
âIâm a liarâŠborn to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist.â
David Cornwell, aka John Le
I think I have only read about six of his books and mostly the earlier classic stuff. This has inspired me to pick him back up again, especially his later work.
Le Carre also narrates the audiobook and does a wonderful job, with wit and nuance. The perfect storyteller. Do yourself a big favor and track this one down.
All written with his characteristic economy and eye for jargon and dialogue, and very entertaining.
- John le Carré, quoting a dictum of Graham Greene, in 'The Pigeon Tunnel"
First, a disclosure, I was given this book by Viking Books. These types of offers I typically refuse. I don't like feeling under obligation to review or even
Surprisingly, this is le le Carré's first memoir. That both feels a bit strange and a bit right. First, le Carré is a master at timing and also understands when is the proper point to introduce a character and how much to show. John le Carré, the pen name for David Cornwell, is often reluctant to do interviews (their is a bit about that in this book) and is a bit publicity shy. He isn't Pynchon or Salinger for sure, but the energy of pimping his stuff and his reluctance sometimes to delve into the narrative of his own life (he worked for awhile for both MI-5 and MI-6) and his relationship with his father seems to be something he is often reluctant to discuss. Ironically, these two issues feed his fiction heavily. His father and his relationship with his father's ghost seems to push through most of his fiction. So, too, obviously does le Carré time as David Cornwell the spy. There is a thin, unbleached muslin shroud between fact and fiction (le Carré talks about his in this book). Perhaps le Carré's greatest book, A Perfect Spy, which Philip Roth (yes, that Philip F'ing Roth) once called "the best English novel since the War" was grown out of David Cornwell's relationship with his own father.
The memoir itself is filled with anecdotes and loosely goes from past to present, but also breaks time's arrow to describe certain relationships with certain people or movies made of his books. I loved especially the parts of this book where le Carré writes about Graham Greene and the craft of writing. I knew le Carré got around, but after reading the memoir, I can safely say he belongs with George Orwell, Graham Greene, William T. Vollmann, Paul Theroux family of adventure writers whose fiction is informed from the trenches. They don't just know where some bodies are actually buried, they may have seen the corpse AND the murder.
So, why only four stars? Because I'm judging this book against his best fiction. This is a fun memoir and a very good le Carré. Again, going back to how this is his first memoir, I wonder why now? I hope he is not done with fiction. I hope this is not him saying, I'm done. He is in his 80s, and after he is done, I'm not sure what to do. We have been waiting for 400 years for another playwright to equal Shakespeare. How many centuries will we have to wait for another le Carré. Dear GOD, I fear too long.
The Pigeon Tunnel is not a conventional autobiography but, rather, a selection of memoirs and includes among its highlights le CarrĂ©âs pen portraits of Richard Burton (who so memorably brought the tortured Alec Leamas to the big screen in the film of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold) and Alec Guinness (who I canât avoid seeing whenever I reread any of the stories featuring George Smiley), together with a sad encounter with Fritz Lang. The longest individual piece focuses on Ronnie, the authorâs errant father, whose fictional counterpart enlivened the largely autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy.
The pieces are all written with le CarrĂ©âs glorious prose which though immediately recognisable remains inimitable. There are some self-deprecating notes about his time in the intelligence world, though, predictably, we learn few actual details. He also tells us nothing about his time as a teacher at Eton â indeed this spell of his life, about which I would love to learn more, is only referred to a couple of times, and then only in passing. We do learn a little about the mechanics of his writing â like Iris Murdoch, his novels are written by hand rather than typed â and we are given a slight insight into the research he undertakes for his books, though most of his work remains a mystery. As with Anthony Powellâs marvellous Dance to the Music of Time sequence, in which the reader learns next to nothing about the author even after reading twelves volumes of a novel so clearly based upon the writerâs life, we donât emerge from this book knowing very much more about John le CarrĂ©. That doesnât matter, though. The book is enchanting and beguiling in its own right, and a joy to read.
pieces in the New Yorker or the Times Magazine, most of it was new to me. Third, I had no idea, despite having read his biography recently, how much research he puts into his writing. All told,
The
What surprised me the most was the care LeCarre takes in crafting his stories, the education he undertakes to understand the countries, people, politics, and situations he writes about. I'm not a writer so I'm not sure how prevalent some of his techniques are among authors, but I was blown away by how meticulous and unique his approach is to his work.
LeCarre (which is just a pen name, by the way) seems to be the self-deprecating sort so I think he'd consider this book a trifle among the greats he's authored, but it was a joy for me to experience. If you're a fan, I highly recommend it.
Der Autor: John Le CarrĂ©, 1931 geboren, studierte in Bern und Oxford. Er war Lehrer in Eton und arbeitete wĂ€hrend des Kalten Kriegs kurze Zeit fĂŒr den britischen Geheimdienst. Seit nunmehr fĂŒnfzig Jahren ist das Schreiben sein Beruf. Er lebt in London und Cornwall.
Die Memoiren eines Jahrhundert-Autors: Was macht das Leben eines Schriftstellers aus? Mit dem Welterfolg Der Spion, der aus der KĂ€lte kam gab es fĂŒr John Le CarrĂ© keinen Weg zurĂŒck. Er kĂŒndigte seine Stelle im diplomatischen Dienst, reiste zu Recherchezwecken um den halben Erdball - Afrika, Russland, Israel, USA, Deutschland -, traf die MĂ€chtigen aus Politik- und Zeitgeschehen und ihre heimlichen Handlanger. John Le CarrĂ© ist bis heute ein exzellenter und unabhĂ€ngiger Beobachter, mit untrĂŒglichem GespĂŒr fĂŒr Macht und Verrat. Aber auch fĂŒr die komischen Seiten des weltpolitischen Spiels.
âStories for my lifeâ is an apt subtitle for the book. With recollections directly from the author, it makes a delightful and revealing companion volume to Andrew Sismanâs recent biography of John le Carre.
It seems that le Carré loved to travel to the places that he wrote about, and people liked to talk to him. There's a huge cast of characters here from the various worlds that he touched: politics, espionage, journalism, media and the arts. He met some of the most famous and important people of the 20th Century, as well as many less famous but fascinating people. A name check from this book includes: Margaret Thatcher, Yasser Arafat, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Burton, Alec Guinness, Fritz Lang, Andrei Sakharov, a head of MI6 and two heads of the KGB. The not-famous people are an even more extraordinary mix, including a great Czech actor who defected to become a doctor, a French woman who rescued orphans from war zones, the American journalist who may also have been a Nazi-hunting vigilante, and le Carré's larger-than-life con-man father.
I really did not want this book to end: the stories that we get are clearly only a small slice of his adventures.
So the 3-star is an average - a mix of 2, 3 and 4 stars.
I came to this book as someone who greatly admires Cornwellâs books and articles, has watched
Biased or not, this book did not give me any evidence that my admiration for David Cornwell and his works has been misplaced.
The structure of this book supports dipping in and out. There are many short sections describing incidents of note, or describing a character who provided the inspiration for one of Cornwellâs characters or who was a significant person in their own right and whom Cornwell encountered in his life, either incidentally or through his efforts to do research. I enjoyed the whole book and found the bite-size snippets for the authorâs life to be intriguing and informative.
While Cornwell did not describe or discuss any of his activities while working in MI5 and MI6, the incidents he did discuss left me with a sense of a parallel world of intrigue and secrecy that most people do not see in their everyday life. There was a sense of everything you know not necessarily being real. I was reminded of Umberto Ecoâs stories that, to me, were mostly about showing how the world we know, the history in the books, and the actions of governments and public figures, are not really the world that is around us.
David Cornwellâs father, Ronnie, was a conman, serial seducer, and a real charmer. The longest, most intense and most harrowing part of the book to read was, âSon of the authorâs fatherâ. In this thirty-five page chapter, Cornwell describes incidents that shed light on his relationship with his father and his mother, but predominantly his father. It was the one part of the book where one could get a sense of real angst and emotion about the matter being discussed. He describes how he had investigators seek out evidence to verify the veracity of his own memories. This chapter struck me as very personal.
If someone asked me to recommend a single section from this book, and I had to give a one section answer, I would propose the Introduction. The Introduction is twelve pages full of interesting detail and background, but also a warning. Cornwell explains that in describing the incidents he has been true to his memory, but goes on to say that his writing career has involved using memory and imagination, that his previous occupation as a spy in MI5 and MI6 was, by its nature, prone to deception, and that he was brought up by a father whose whole life was devoted to confidence tricks. In this context he questions the concept of âpure memoryâ and begs the question of how accurate his own memory might be.
If that hypothetical person were to ask me to recommend a single section from this book, my real response would be, âRead the whole bookâ.
Would I recommend this book?
Most definitely.
Who would I recommend it to?
Anyone.
Would I read more works by this author?
Certainly.
Did this book inspire me in any way?
I am inspired to read the Sisman biography of David Cornwell and to read the few Le Carré novels I have not yet reached.
*âRightâ as in âcorrectâ; not âRightâ as in âpoliticsâ.