The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

"What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives."

I hesitate to call The Spy Who Came in from the Cold a spy novel, because I think that phrase brings with it certain modern connotations. This book is an espionage novel.

The events in the book occur in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the Cold War. The British Secret Intelligence Service asks Alec Leamas to pretend to defect to East Germany and then feed them misinformation that would lead them to believe that one of their men was a British double agent. This is the crux of the story. To make Leamas seem prime for defection, he is unceremoniously sacked and provided with only a meager pension. Leamas is given a job at a small library, from which is promptly gets fired.

By the time the East German Communists decide to come calling on Leamas, he has drunk himself into a hole. What Leamas and British Intelligence did not count on was that someone else would also coming calling on him. Liz Gold, a woman that he met while working at the library is concerned for Leamas, and comes to find him and make sure he is alright. It is unclear to the reader how much Leamas is still in control of his life at this point and--at least initially--if he has actual feelings for Gold. Perhaps Leamas wasn't sure himself. Needless to say, Gold's involvement with Leamas complicates everything.

I cannot think of a a novel with an ending that was more taut than The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

Don't Hassel the Hoff by David Hasselhoff

The sex thing was still bothering me. In church, I became aroused every time I kneeled down prior to taking communion. - Hasselhoff on puberty

'Well, Wiener, it's you and me against the world.' - Hasselhoff on being newly divorced

Maybe Looking for Freedom did have some influence on the Wall coming down. - Hasselhoff on personally ending the Cold War

As you can tell, Don't Hassel the Hoff was rife with unintentional comedy. Hasselhoff has quite the high opinion of himself, to be sure, though how can you blame him when people yell, "Thank you for existing!" at him and when he restores peoples' faith in God on a regular basis (ok, just once or twice, but still). There are a number of anecdotes about how his presence made ridiculous impacts in people's lives. While I agree with Jim that this reflects poorly on the people who made the ridiculous statements (like the girl who promised not to kill herself just because she saw him in an elevator), I also think the fact that he includes them as stories about how cool he is demonstrates pretty clearly how big an ego he has. But then again, I've never had a 22-some with Tom Jones and 20 dancers, so what do I know?

Another amusing part of this book was that every once in awhile Hasselhoff would use the British spelling of a word, despite the fact that he grew up in Baltimore. Like "faeces" and "programme." Who spells it "faeces"? Seriously. I don't know how drunk the ghostwriter/editor must have been when they went over this book for a final time, because there are definitely a few errors and incorrectly used words. For example, when Hasselhoff was in South Africa one time a bunch of kids mobbed him and gave him stuffed giraffes, one of whom was Charlize Theron (spelled Charleze in the book). I didn't mind, though; it just added to the charm/hilariousness of the book.

Another thing, Hasselhoff loves to name drop. Doesn't matter how pointless it is to the story he's telling, if he can shoehorn in a celebrity recognizing/talking to/praising him, he'll do it.

I will say this about Hasselhoff, though: (according to him) he does a lot of great work with charity, especially those that help sick children.

A few more things: I have no idea how Baywatch stayed on the air for as long as it did (thirteen seasons!); shortly before the Berlin Wall fell, Hasselhoff did a concert in Germany in which he drove a car (named Freedom) through a styrofoam wall on stage. He also was pissed that there was no mention of his performance (linked above; how bout that light up jacket?) of Looking for Freedom at a museum dedicated to the fall of the Wall (he acknowledges that people gave him a lot of shit for saying that, but never denies feeling it); Hasselhoff spent a couple of years during high school in the Atlanta area and attended Marist (my school's biggest rival. bitches); David is also really pissed that his singing career never took off in America. It clearly continues to bug him.

That's about all. If you're ever looking for a light, funny read, I guess maybe read this book. It's at least entertaining.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre

"But what is the justification then? What is it? For us it is easy, as I said to you last night. The Abteilung and organizations like it are the natural extension of the Party's arm. They are in the vanguard of the fight for Peace and Progress. They are to the Party what the Party is to socialism: they are the vanguard. Stalin said so--" he smiled drily, "it is not fashionable to quote Stalin--but he once said 'Half a million liquidated is a statistic, and one man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy.' He was laughing, you see, at the borgeois sensibilities of the mass. He was a great cynic. But what he meant is still true: a movement which protects itself against counterrevolution can hardly stop at the exploitation--or the elimination, Leamas--of a few individuals. It is all one, we have never pretended to be wholly just in the process of nationalizing society. Some Roman said it, didn't he, in the Christian Bible--it is expedient that one man should die for the benefit of many?"

"I expect so," Leamas replied wearily.

"Then what do you think? What is your philosophy?"

"I just think the whole lot of you are bastards," said Leamas savagely.


I have been away too long. But no matter, I am back with a vengeance, and May is--drum roll--Graham Greene month! In which I will review only books which are inspired by, loved by, or just plain written by, British author Graham Greene. Greene wrote a lot of very serious novels that explored the intricacies of his Catholic faith, but he also wrote a preponderance of what he called "entertainments"--spy novels, like Our Man in Havana, The Third Man, and The Orient Express. He called John LeCarre's Cold War novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, according to the book jacket, "The best spy story I have ever read." To which the New York Time retorts, "It may be the best spy story anybody has ever read." Zing!

It is decidedly not the best spy story I have ever read. Honestly, I see very little of what Greene finds so fantastic about it--it is taut, and cleverly conceived, but in other ways seems very unremarkable to me. The set up is this: Alec Leamas, a surly British field agent in East Germany, is put "out in the cold"--decommissioned, that is--after failing to prevent the murder of his best informant and the dissolution of his network in the country. Leamas takes up work in a library, shacking up with a pretty Jewish librarian--who just happens to be a communist, not that Leamas really cares--and ends up going to jail for assaulting a grocery clerk.

As an impoverished felon, Leamas is a perfect candidate to be approached by East German spies looking to "turn" British agents, and when they do, Leamas agrees to be taken across the Iron Curtain to tell them what he knows. But, in truth, Leamas has committed to undertake one last mission--using his position as a double agent (triple agent?) to plant evidence that his chief opponent in the East German network, Hans-Dieter Mundt, is actually a British double agent himself. What LeCarre does so well is to muddle things up so that Leamas--and the reader--begin to suspect that perhaps Mundt really is a British agent and Leamas has been sent to commit some act of espionage so secret he doesn't even know what it is.

That all sounds quite a bit more suspenseful than it is in practice. Except for a nice pair of bookended shoot-em-up scenes, the book is little more than a series of dull conversations between Leamas and his superiors, his girlfriends, or his various East German contacts. These conversations contain a few choice philosophical moments like the one I've excerpted above, but also a lot of pretty intricate details that Leamas provides about his work as a spy, which unfortunately seem about as dull and complex as I imagine spy work to actually be.

Graham Greene-o-Meter: I give this book five Greenes out of ten. Meh.

The Bhagavad Gita by Krishna

I read the Bhagavad Gita because it was short and because it seemed like it would be interesting. It's one of the primary religious texts of the Hindu religion, but you wouldn't necessarily pick that up from the cursory read I gave it.

It's set up in the format of an epic poem, with the narrative picking up right before Arjuna, our protagonist, enters a battle in a civil war, fighting against his own people and even some of his own family. While he's debating the best course of action, the god Krishna comes down and has a little chat about life, philosophy, and everything to set his mind at ease.

It touches on some of the cardinal concepts behind Hinduism as I understand it, including reincarnation and the godliness of all things. It also talks about aspects I'd never considered, such as when Krishna explains why there's nothing wrong with killing your enemies. Something to do with everyone ending up in the same place anyway. Makes sense to me.

To be honest, I enjoyed the Tao Te Ching more, but I understand that there is more than one key text to Hindi, and also that this is only part of a much larger poem. Perhaps it's more interesting in that context. Without it or any religious affiliation, it didn't really grab me.

Edit: Thanks Brian in the comments section for pointing me to this free online translation. The introductory notes are particularly helpful.

Underworld by Don DeLillo

"They had the rear of the bus to themselves on the ride back, the motor right below them, heat beating up, and they dozed on each other's shoulders, faces sun-tight and eyes stinging slightly, tired, hungry, happy, the bus belching heat below them."

"I long for the days of disorder. I want them back the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. That is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself."

If you require a strong, linear plot to propel you through a novel, then Don DeLillio's massive tome about Cold War America isn't for you. If you like endings that time up everything neatly, or where all the loose ends are tied together into a nice braid, this probably isn't the book you should pick up. If Hemmingway is your favorite author, well, the excerpts at the top of the review should tell you all you need to know.

If you've enjoyed DeLillo in the past and you like sprawling, epic novels, you owe it to yourself to check out Underworld. Ostensibly tied together by the movement from person to person of the home-run ball from "The Shot Heard Around the World." Within its path are the lives of dozens of characters, the main one of which, Nick Shay, has a secret that forms what tension exists in the book. The book isn't intended, however as a thriller. It's a slow moving slice-of-life about paranoia, death, religion, growing old, America, the Cold War, and the latter half of this century. I personally found it hard to put down, and I have to say that the prose is some of the most beautiful I've ever read. There's a passage near the end of the book that describes a landfill in such a tragic, nostalgic way that it almost gives me chills. That takes some skill.

The book is 827 pages long, but despite that, felt a lot shorter than Cosmopolis, one of the other two DeLillo novels I read this year. Underworld also eschews DeLillo's usual trademark of keeping a safe emotional distance from his characters, choosing instead to relate their inner turmoil through incomplete sentences, awkward pauses, strange guestures, and every other tool at his disposal. This book was recently chosen as runner-up for the best work of American fiction in the last 25 years. I would say it deserves those accolades. It was a challenging book, and it ends my 50 with a bang.

Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley

First of all...I love the cover art for this book and for Brave New World. Okay, now that that is out of the way, I had a lot of trouble getting through this book. It is not even half as long as Brave New World, but it took me nearly as long to read. There is no doubt that Huxley was a brilliant man. After all, he was 62 years old and blind in one eye when he penned this rumination on his most famous work. However, while I thoroughly enjoyed the writing of Brave New World, I found large portions of Brave New World Revisited to be rather tedious.

The twelve chapters of this book were originally published as a series of articles for Newsday during the height of the Cold War. They varied in topic from, over-population to brainwashing to subconscious persuasion. In the final chapter, by far the most interesting, Huxley discusses what can be done to combat the problems he outlined throughout the rest of the book. Most of the societal threats outlined in the book are described by Huxley as threats to freedom. For this and other reasons, it is painfully obvious that Huxley wrote this during the middle of the Cold War. A fear of communism pervades this work.

Despite these drawbacks, if you have read Brave New World, this may be worth your time. You may find it easier to get through than I did. I did find some parts of the book very interesting and thought-provoking.