Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Book Description

John le Carré's classic novels deftly navigate readers through the intricate shadow worlds of international espionage with unsurpassed skill and knowledge and have earned him -- and his hero, British Secret Service agent George Smiley -- unprecedented worldwide acclaim.

A modern masterpiece in which le Carré expertly creates a total vision of a secret world, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy begins George Smiley's chess match of wills and wits with Karla, his Soviet counterpart.

It is now beyond doubt that a mole, implanted decades ago by Moscow Centre, has burrowed his way into the highest echelons of British Intelligence. His treachery has already blown some of its most vital operations and its best networks. It is clear that the double agent is one of its own kind. But which one? George Smiley is assigned to identify him. And once identified, the traitor must be destroyed.

Customer Reviews:

It Earns its Perch on the Short List.......2007-02-09

Upon publication in April, 1974, John Le Carre's "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" was acclaimed a masterpiece of the cold war spy genre, and short listed -- along with several other Le Carre works-- for greatest spy story of them all. Firstly, there was Le Carre's immense, first-hand, front-line spying experience. His lean, mean writing. The plot, dealing with Britain's MI5 international spy agency; it's a marvel of clarity and complexity. The irresistible narrative force. Another of the author's great set piece openings, plus a few more.

As to the characters, there's the long-suffering George Smiley, his beautiful offstage wife Lady Ann. The inscrutable Bill Haydon: at one point, late in the narrative, Smiley does actually think of him as that Russian doll: one doll within another, within another. The implacable opponent, Russia's Karla, head of KGB, MI5's opposite number. Smiley's confrontation with him, in a 1950's Indian prison, sears itself into the brain. The whole MI5 gang: control, Percy Alleline, Ricky Tarr, Roy Bland, Peter Guillam, Inspector Mendel, Oliver Lacon, Toby Esterhase, Connie Sachs, Jerry Westerby, and, most importantly, Jim Prideaux, the loyal man most severely injured by a Czechoslovakian cock-up. Finally, Bill Roach, richest boy at the school where Prideaux now teaches, emotionally resonant,fat, miserable, and devoted to Prideaux.

A dying control (head of organization) believes there's a mole-- that is, a long-term counterspy placed within a spying organization-- it's a term Le Carre actually invented, and the world now uses-- in MI5. In control's effort to smoke out the mole, so-called Gerald, the chief sets in motion an ill-advised Czechoslovak operation, with disastrous results. So at control's death, Percy Alleline, one of the boys, benefiting from an all-around wizard source, takes over the organization and gets his knighthood. But the mole's still flashing his presence. So who is it: in control's immortal words, taken from a British children's rhyme-- tinker, tailor, soldier, spy, or Smiley, whom we learn is beggarman? (Oddly enough, this famous formulation, the book's title, is not introduced until late.) The minister in charge sets Smiley to find out.

Coming back to this book after many years, thing I find most striking is that there's a dimension beyond tight writing, knowing spycraft, masterful plot and characters: feeling. Smiley, close to finally unraveling the betrayal, confronts Esterhase, chief of the lamplighters: the tradecraft men. "It is the perfect fix; you see that, don't you Toby, really? Assuming it is a fix. It makes everyone wrong who's right: Connie Sachs, Jerry Westerby...Jim Prideaux...even control. Silences the doubters before they've even spoken out...The permutations are infinite, once you've brought off the basic lie....Take it to its logical conclusion, and Gerald would have us strangling our own children in their beds."

Smiley is angry, as is his creator, and that will influence the outcome of the final great set-piece, the book's conclusion. It earns its perch on the short list.

really enjoyed it.......2007-02-07

Le Carre has this reputation for complexity that can be off-putting, but I found this novel to be an approachable, exciting, and hard-to-put-down story. It boils down to a variation on the detective novel, but instead of a "who done it" it's a "who is it" mystery. We follow the primary investigator as he tracks down leads and puts 2 and 2 together until he gets his man. I was up way too late a few nights in a row, reading until I was too tired to keep my eyes open. Simply put, if you enjoy both espionage "genre fiction" and literature as well, then Le Carre is for you. As for complexity, TTSS is more complex than novels by Tom Clancy or Ian Fleming to be sure, but it's not Tolstoy or Dostoevsky either.

Quite A Nursery Ryme.......2007-01-21

A very complicated story with a protagonist that is unmatched in spy fiction. First and perhaps the strongest in a trilogy of Smiley vs. Karla books. A great read by a great author.

One of the best realistic spy novels ever.......2007-01-06

The best aspect of this book is that it is realistic and thrilling at the same time. If you read nonfiction cold war espionage stories, you find that stuff like this actually did happen. Le Carre gives you a look at the actual workings of spycraft and the techniques that were used during the cold war.

The book is written from the perspective of several different people in turns, but never from the perspective of the antagonists, so the author doesn't give away what the other side is doing until the protagonists themselves find out. Even though it is a third-person narrative approach, it mainly sticks with a couple characters (Guillam and Smiley), and the author doesn't actually reveal the thoughts of any characters except Guillam and Smiley.

Even though I also gave Absolute Friends 5 stars, this book is a little bit better, mainly because in Tinker Tailor the solutions to all the puzzles (or most of them anyway) are satisfactorily revealed in the end, and the ending is not excessivley clever, which is a weakness of many thriller novels (including Absolute Friends and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold).

Be warned, however: the story is complicated, and Le Carre does not explain everything for you. You are expected to make a lot of inferences. It can be fun to have to work at understanding what is going on, but if you are the type of person who doesn't like to have to turn back the pages frequently to try to make sense of the story, this may not be for you. It is the kind of book you have to read slowly. There are so many characters to keep track of that you might even need to take some notes, especially if you are going to put the book down for a while before coming back to it. Never fear, however: your hard work will not be in vain. The puzzles are actually worth the effort.

One thing that was sometimes unnecessarily frustrating was Le Carre's use of terminology that would be familiar to spies (and to devoted fans of espionage literature) but which is not known to most lay-people--especially those who are not British. For the most part, you can figure out what these terms mean from the context, but it would have been nice to have a glossary of British spy jargon or something.

Suggestions for other books:
If you want a more modern espionage/mystery novel, try The Prisoner of Guantanamo by Fesperman, which has the same high quality and realism as le Carre's books.
Barry Eisler is good if you are looking for an author who leans slightly more towards action and thrills, but not so much that it is unbelievable. (although they may be slightly less realistic, his books are still quite plausible).

"If you make your enemy look stupid, you lose the justification for taking him on.".......2006-12-15

Following in the tradition of Graham Greene, who wrote spy novels contemporaneous with his own, John LeCarre uses his experience in the foreign service and MI6 to add realism to his tales of espionage. Green, however, remained a friend of traitor Kim Philby and continued to send his novels to Philby after Philby defected to Russia. LeCarre was betrayed by Philby to Russian agents, and his career was ended. This betrayal gives added realism to his novels, which show real disillusionment with the system and, sometimes, with its agents and officials.

Written in 1974, this novel draws on the real life of "LeCarre" (real name David Cornwell) and many of his associates who were unmasked by Philby and the "Cambridge Five." Here LeCarre creates a vivid and morally probing story in which his hero, George Smiley, is called out of his enforced retirement to unmask a Soviet "mole" high in the British secret service, referred to as "the circus." Five men (as in the real betrayal) have been suspected of aiding the Soviets. Drawing on his friendships with some of the agents who were dismissed when he was, Smiley investigates the security leaks which have led to humiliation for British intelligence and real danger for some of its agents. As he tries to identify the mole, he receives peripheral help from Sir Oliver Lacon of the British Foreign Office.

Written in formal and polished prose, the novel is full of Cold War complexities. Karla, the legendary head of Soviet intelligence, continues to control a small group of Soviet "defectors" and "disillusioned" Communists, whom the British mistakenly regard as double agents providing them with secret information. At the same time, British Control (who is never identified by name) is trying to uncover the Soviet mole (nicknamed "Gerald") within their own agency. Jim Prideaux, who appears in several Smiley novels, is working on this operation in Czechoslovakia when he is betrayed and almost killed, his entire operation shut down, and many of his agents executed by the Russians.

Smiley's investigations are decidedly prosaic, not the exciting shoot-'em-ups of James Bond novels. Slogging through mountains of paperwork, interviewing reluctant former agents, and doing his own legwork, Smiley works at unmasking Gerald the hard way. The complexity of his character (and of the other characters here) make up for the relative lack of dramatic action and highlight LeCarre's skill at creating intriguing characters who see the "grays" in an otherwise black-and-white world. His dialogue is quick-paced, often witty, and revelatory of subtle character traits, adding to the depth of the portraits and to the intricacies of the world of spy/counterspy. n Mary Whipple

Average customer rating:

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
John Le Carre
Manufacturer: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Spy Stories & Tales of Intrigue | Thrillers | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books

All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0340733748

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy/Audio Cassettes

Average customer rating:

Good book but not good for listening to in car

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy/Audio Cassettes
John Le Carre , and Frank Muller
Manufacturer: Recorded Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio Cassette

General | Books on Cassette | Audiobooks | Formats | Books

General | Mystery | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books

General | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1556905165

Customer Reviews:

Good book but not good for listening to in car.......2001-02-15

Memo to self: books I listen to in the car should not have

- a complex plot (because if I miss something I'm out of luck)

- a wealth of detail (because it makes the book just too slow-moving)

Unfortunately, this book has both, which drastically limited my appreciation of it. It didn't help, either, that Muller reads with a fast, low, conspiratorial tone, which is appropriate to the book but makes it very hard to hear when driving at the speed limit on I-95.

Amazon.com

This three-in-one set of le Carré thrillers about late cold war spycraft has wit, atmosphere, and intelligence to die for. In le Carré's most autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy, Rick Pym, a con artist Dickens might have invented (except that he's based on le Carré's dad) raises his son, Magnus, to be the perfect gentleman for the spook trade. Magnus writes to explain himself to his son, Tom; le Carré wrote the book to explain his own scalawag dad to himself, and burst into tears when he finished the novel.

In The Russia House, set in 1987, a Soviet dissident physicist drops a secret manuscript to Barley Blair, a boozy loser of a British book publisher, to alert the West that the evil empire is about to collapse of its own absurd weight. Can Western spies trust the dissident? Just how safe is the "safe house" where Barley parleys with his sexy Russian contact, Katya? Where should Barley's loyalty lie, with love or country?

The Secret Pilgrim is almost a short-story collection. (That's why it was broken into three separate audio versions: The Fledgling Spy, The Spy Who Came of Age, and The Spy in His Prime.) Ned, a British spook who Barley troubled in The Russia House, invites le Carré's legendary spy George Smiley to lecture his new class of recruits. Smiley's remarks alternate with Ned's reminiscences of his own covert adventures, from the sublimely ridiculous to the scathingly scary. The new kids have no idea what tortuous moral torments await them, but le Carré gives us an idea.

Customer Reviews:

Perhaps Best for LeCarre Bores.......2007-08-02

"A New Collection," brings together three novels of Brit John LeCarre's prolific middle period, "A Perfect Spy," "The Russia House," and "The Secret Pilgrim." LeCarre, whose masterworks include "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold," "Smileys People," and "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," was, of course, an actual British spy, for five years, under his birth name, David Cornwell. According to internet biographers, he was, in fact, embedded in Soviet territory when he was blown by Kim Philby, most famous post-war British secret service traitor.

When LeCarre published "A Secret Spy" in 1986, much-honored American novelist Philip Roth declared it "the best English novel since the war." It is LeCarre's most personal, autobiographical novel, detailing, as it does, how a con man father much like LeCarre's own, (Richard Thomas Archibald Cornwell), creates a perfect spy and counterspy in his son. Interestingly enough, the book also mentions Philby, and his partners in traitor-hood, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, by name. But I didn't find the novel interesting as a whole. It's more than 500 pages long, and, from the beginning, the story runs along two tracks: one, the childhood-youth of Magnus Pym, that made him what he was, and two, the defensive activities of the secret service once he's blown. Not until page 300, much longer than many non-devoted readers will persist, does it get to the interesting section, his actual life as a spy/counterspy.

"The Russia House," in contrast, stands on its own as a thriller. It's set in 1987, the third year of Russia's attempt to open up --"Glasnost"--and details the efforts of a brilliant Soviet scientist to get information about the weakness of Russia's offensive armaments to the West. To do this, he uses Katya, beautiful Russian editor, and Barley Scott Blair, classy drunken British publisher, providing us with a moving, mature love story as well. The spy story's well-backgrounded, and engrossing: it opens with one of the author's writing trademarks, a good set piece, a Russian trade fair, gives us generous helpings of another of the writer's trademarks, the midnight meetings of the spy managers, the "Whitehall Mandarins;" has a resonant, complex plot, and his usual good dialogue/descriptive writing. It even gives us a happy Hollywood ending: not quite as happy as the actual Hollywood movie based upon it, starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, but Barley does get the girl, her children and uncle, sooner or later.

The third book, "The Secret Pilgrim" is really a loosely jointed compilation of short stories, the memoirs of Ned, who was Barley Blair's controller, as he faces retirement. We learn a bit more about the Russia House story, and about the intense days in "the circus," as LeCarre calls his fictional spy service, as it cleans house of its traitorous counterspies. Some of the short stories are more interesting than others. But, as all are narrated in flashback, and none achieve lift-off due to the book's episodic nature, the book may be a bit bloodless for some. Once again, it's probably best for devoted readers.

More than espionage.......2006-11-13

The three central questions of this trilogy:

1. How do you retain your humanity as your innocence and illusions die?
2. At the end of the day, are you any different or any more right than your enemy?
3. Do the ends justify the means?

See how George Smiley, a titan in the guise of a downtrodden, inconsequential man, learns the answers.

I'll take great trilogies for $1000, Alex..........2006-03-22

Seldom do trilogies work out... for the reader, that is. Most of the time they seem to be some a kind of perverse sandwich, with a bland slice of white bread stuck between the real meat of character and plot (See the Dune Trilogy, for instance).

This is not the case with Le Carre, who deftly uses the Honourable Schoolboy to set us up for the conclusion of Smiley's People. There is no neat linear progression of plot from Tinker Tailor to the denouement, the apprehension of Karla and the triumph, however muted or understated, of George Smiley, but a finely-varied panorama of character, setting, and action, well-paced and well-presented.

Le Carre seems capable of creating fully-realized characters at will, without ever falling into the trap of predictability or homogeneity. His people reveal different facets of their personality from novel to novel. For instance, the Toby Esterhazy of Smiley's People, selling fake Degas bronzes, is a more rounded, more human, but identifiable and convincing extrapolation from the haughtily dismissive Toby of Tinker Tailor.

And such character development takes place within the framework of themes set forth in the first novel, e.g., the stretch between the spy as public servant and as a civilian with very human wants and needs, the gulf between the liberal Smiley who attempts to see the world through the eyes of others - such as when he meets Karla in India - and the fanatical Karla who pays the price for his "lack of moderation", the tension between ideology and personal loyalty - symbolized by the mole's betrayal of his best friend, on the orders of Moscow Centre.

No one is better at creating the milieu of the cold war as a backdrop for the exploration and interplay of personalities.

In short, three great reads.

Le Carre is simply the best !.......1998-12-16

When I make my fantasy list of the best books I've ever read, Le Carre's trilogy about George Smiley is near the top. The author is difficult reading. You have to pour over most paragraphs, so as not to miss each nouance. Smiley is the ultimate father figure in espionage literature. You are comfortable when he is there and figuring things out, but you marvel at the complexity and difficulty of what he has to do, and how he does it. I commend this to anyone who loves rich characterization, and wants a book he or she will come back to again and again.

Outstanding modern fiction.......1998-11-08

I was interested in the espionage story but what I found most compelling were the characters and how much i grew to care about them over time (especially Smiley). The conclusion, that if you choose the methods of your enemy you are no better than your enemy is quite true. I do not like much modern fiction but found these three novels completely compelling, and have read them twice.

Average customer rating:

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
John Le Carre
Manufacturer: Bantam Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000GROV5W

Average customer rating:

Tinker, Tailor, soldier, Spy

Manufacturer: Franklin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Leather Bound
ASIN: B000BD15IW

Product Description

Beautiful, leather bound silver gilt edged, illustrated book in absolutely pristine condition!! A wonderful gift!!!

Average customer rating:

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY
John Le Carre
Manufacturer: Book Club Associates
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000IO03AK

Average customer rating:

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
John Le Carre
Manufacturer: Franklin Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000E33D3E

Product Description

Beautiful Blue leatherette Hardcover with silver gilting on cover and edges of page

Average customer rating:

Tinker, Tailor, soldier, Spy
John Le Carre
Manufacturer: Bantam Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000E8SXR0

Average customer rating:
The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

Manufacturer: Viking Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000HWB9XI

Average customer rating:

The author of this book should have been shot

A voyage towards a masterpiece?

Unwittingly, a masterpiece

Famous Word Cycle

It makes you think
The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus
Cyril Connolly
Manufacturer: Persea Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Authors | Arts & Literature | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
General | British | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
General | Mystery | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books
General | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays (Nonpareil Book, 78)

Essays and Aphorisms (The Penguin Classics)

Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life

Things I Didn't Know: A Memoir

Enemies of Promise

ASIN: 0892550589

Book Description

This enduring classic is "a book which, no matter how many readers it will ever have, will never have enough" (Ernest Hemingway).

Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) was one of the most influential book reviewers and critics in England, contributing regularly to The New Statesmen, The Observer, and The Sunday Times. His essays have been collected in book form and published to wide acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Unquiet Grave is considered by many to be his most enduring work. It is a highly personal journal written during the devastation of World War II, filled with reflective passages that deal with aging, the break-up of a long term relationship, and the horrors of the war around him. It is also a wonderfully varied intellectual feast: a collection of aphorisms, epigrams, and quotations from such masters of European literature as Horace, Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, and Goethe.

Dazzlingly original in both form and content, The Unquiet Grave has continued to influence generations of writers.

Customer Reviews:

The author of this book should have been shot.......2006-11-04

It is difficult, though not quite impossible, to understand why this tedious piece of self-abuse should still be in print, and selling, after 60 years -- or indeed, why it was ever printed.

'The Unquiet Grave' represents the final degradation of an idea that started out without merit, that the feeling artist is the moral arbiter of his society.

Fans think Connolly deep. 'Strewth, he was so shallow that he couldn't assign any greater significance to a world war with naziism than that it interfered with his contemplation of the beautiful task of being Cyril Connolly.

In any righteous age, he would have been disposed of as useless mouth when worthier people were dying of hunger.

A voyage towards a masterpiece?.......2006-04-02

This work was written according to the author's introduction to the revised version between 1942 and 1943 in the midst of the great war. It was written when the former capitol of the world, according to him, London was filled with gloom. It is a reflection on literature and life, and many believe it is the masterpiece that Cyril Connally all his life strove to create.
In it he reflects on greatness in literature and on the meaning of the true masterpiece. He says,when including works by Horace, Virgil, Villon, Montaigne, La Fontaine, La Rouchefoucaud, La Bruyere, Baudelaire, Pope, Leopardi, Rimbaud, Byron in his list, that what is common to them is"Love of life and nature: lack of belief in the iea of progress: interest in , mingled with contempt for humanity. .. In feeling, these works of art contain the maximum of emotion compatible with a classical sense of form."
'Palinurus' is clearly a Francophile who in the midst of the war feels deeply the separation from the Continent, from France especially.
He writes what he calls ' the doubts and reflections of a year' in 'three or four rhythms: art, love, nature and religion.an experiment in self- dismantling , a search for the obstruction which is blocking the flow from the well and whereby the name of Palinurus is becoming an archetype of frustration."
The great critic Walter Benjamin thought to construct according to Hannah Arendt , a masterpiece made out of the quotations of other writers. Connally here devotes a good share of the text to the wisest wisdom he according to his lights could find in others. He also offers his own ruminations in part as a way of consoling himself for the personal loss which in some way sets the grieving tone of the work.
Does it amount to a masterpiece? I would almost want to answer ' for those who feel it so'.
Palinurus himself says of Palinurus in the concluding page of the volume, "Palinurus, in fact, though he despises the emptiness of achievement , the applause of the multitude and the rewards of fame, comes in his long exile to hate himself for this contempt and so jumps childishly at the chance to be perpetuated as an obscure cape."
It appears that if Cyril Connally is perpetuated in Literature it will be through this particular voyage in the heart of life and literature.

Unwittingly, a masterpiece.......2006-03-20

Cyril Connolly was a prolifically talented schoolboy. Tipped by many for great literary achievement, he wore the burden of this promise like a ball and chain for the rest of his life, anxiously ruminating on greatness.

He was one of the best read men of his generation, and felt that the virgin snow where Shakespeare and Montaigne cut their initial, deep furrows had since become flattened by innumerable tracks so it was no longer able to receive an impression.

Connolly was a great epicurian intellectual, a man whose mind watches itself in Camus' definition. He brooded obsessively on the human condition, admiring those writers who spat in the eye of the ephemeral fame and glory of their own era to follow the solitary and near impossible road to producing a great masterpiece.

A multitude of journalism, a small novel was written, but the masterpiece Connolly was tipped for never came.

But wait. In the course of a lifetime anxiously pondering, well, life itself, Connolly accumulated a hoard of aphorisms that relate to the human being as he or she passes through the stages of life, some of them from the great writers he admired, some of them his own. Here are some choice cuts:

(From Eliot): ''Someone said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.'

'The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.'

'Everything is a dangerous drug to me except reality, which is unendurable.'

'I am now forced to admit that anxiety is my true condition, occasionally intruded on by work, pleasure, melancholy or despair.'

The quote from Hemingway on the cover of my paperback edition holds true: 'A book which, no matter how many readers it will ever have, will never have enough.'

A masterpiece arrived at through the back door.

Famous Word Cycle.......2005-04-23

The book consists of the doubts and reflections of a year. Life has no more continuity than a pool in the rocks. The author asserts that Christianity and Buddhism are stratagems of failure. Success in life is defined by survival. One should study a long life, Goethe's.

The decision to marry balances the fear of bondage against the fear of loneliness. A man with a will to power can have no friends. A woman's desire for revenge outlasts her other emotions. Three faults infect every activity--laziness, vanity, cowardice. These characteristics are impediments to wisdom.

Happiness rests in the avoidance of angst. Anxiety at being kept waiting is a form of jealousy. Connolly relates that the creative moment of a writer comes with the autumn. Surrealism seems to exist in vast cities. Works of art need valid myths, belief, vocation.

No happiness can be obtained through the destruction of another person's happiness. Reading and routines are sanctuaries. Civilized people get more out of life than the uncivilized. Central heating benefitted the north. Air conditioning will benefit the south. In all cultures factors of decadence are a constant.

Ennui is produced through not fulfilling our potential. Artists, mystics, naturalists, and mathematicians work in solitude. The cortex is a machine for thinking. Tea, coffee, alcohol stimulate. People consumed with curiousity without love should write maxims.

Hemingway saturated his books with the memory of physical pleasure. Art is memory, re-enacted desire. The English language is like a broad river. Unhappiness can be valuable. Bio-physical equilibrium is a source of happiness.

This cobbled-together account of deep reading and thinking makes a wonderful book.

It makes you think.......1999-12-15

The Unquiet Grave smells of the mannered ways of the English Middle Class before WW2. It has a certain pretentiousness which will repel some but open doors for others. It consists of paragraphs each of which contain a thought culled mostly from the wisdom literature of the last 3 millennia. Not all these thoughts are attributed, so some are presumably those of the author. They do, however, hang together well and may spark a high rate of response in their reader. Connolly does seem to reflect the anxious yearning for direction and certainty which infects many. Those people who current wisdom says should be secure in our modern world but who feel anything but secure will find the book reflecting their uncertainties. It will strike more chords in California than Bosnia, and some of the chords will be life enhancing.

Average customer rating:

THE UNQUIET GRAVE A WORD CYCLE
Cyril (Palinurus) Conolly
Manufacturer: Viking Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000NNBLP2

THE UNQUIET GRAVE: A WORD CYCLE BY PALINURUS.

Average customer rating:

THE UNQUIET GRAVE: A WORD CYCLE BY PALINURUS.
No Author.
Manufacturer: Hamish Hamilton
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000RZMGMS

Average customer rating:

The Unquiet Grave a Word Cycle By Palinurus
Cyril Connolly
Manufacturer: Harper & Brothers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000IRW3ZU

Average customer rating:

Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus
Cyril Connolly
Manufacturer: HARPER & BROTHERS
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000OKD33C

Average customer rating:

The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle By Palinurus
Cyril Connolly
Manufacturer: Harper & Bros.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000KXMU1E

Average customer rating:

THE UNQUIET GRAVE: A WORD CYCLE BY PALINURUS.

Manufacturer: Hamish Hamilton
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000HINSIQ

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books