Dreaming of George Smiley

From reading his books and from reading/listening to interviews with him, it is very clear Andrea Camilleri loves crime fiction.  In his third Inspector Montalbano novel, The Snack Thief, a nocturnal encounter with John le Carre and George Smiley helps Montalbano to crack a case:





Apparently, in his sleep, one part of his brain had kept working on the Lapecora case.  Around four o'clock in the morning, in fact, a memory came back to him, and he got up and started searching frantically among his books.  Suddenly he remembered that he'd lent the book he was looking for to Augello, after his deputy had seen the film made from it on television.  He'd now had it for six months and still hadn't given it back.  Montalbano got upset.
     "Hello, Mimi?  Montalbano here."
     "Ohmygod!  What's going on here? What happened?"
     "Do you still have that novel by Le Carre entitled Call for the Dead?  I'm sure I lent it to you."
     "What the fuck?!  It's four in the morning."
     "So what?  I want it back."
     "Salvo, I'm telling you this as a loving brother: why don't you have yourself committed?"
     "I want it back immediately."
     "But I was asleep!  Calm down.  I'll bring it back to the office in the morning.  Otherwise I would have to put on my underwear, start looking, get dressed-"
     "I don't give a shit.  You're going to look for it, find it, get in your car, even in your underwear, and bring it to me."
     He dragged himself about the house for half an hour, doing pointless things like trying to understand the phone bill or reading the label on a bottle of mineral water.  Then he heard a car screech to a halt, a dull thud against the door, and the car leaving.  He opened the door:  the book was on the ground, the light's of Augello's car already far away.  He had a mind to make an anonymous phone call to the carabinieri.
     Hello, this is a concerned citizen.  There's some madman driving around in his underwear...
     He let it drop.  He started leafing through the novel.
     The story went exactly as he'd remembered it.  Page 8:

     "Smiley, Marston speaking.  You interviewed Samuel Arthur Fennan at the Foreign Office on Monday, am I right?"
     "Yes . . . yes I did."
     "What was the case?"
     "Anonymous letter alleging Party membership at Oxford . . ."

     And there, on page 139, was the beginning of the conclusion that Smiley would arrive at in his report:

     "It was, however, possible that he had lost his heart for his work, and that his luncheon invitation to me was a first step to confession.  With this in mind he might also have written the anonymous letter which could have been designed to put him in touch with the Department."

     Following Smiley's logic, it was therefore possible that Lapecora himself had written the anonymous letters exposing him.  But if he was their author, why hadn't he sent them to the police or the carabinieri under some other pretext?

. . .

     Thanks to Smiley, it all made sense.  He went back to sleep.



This reminds me that I still have a lot of John le Carre to tackle, including Call for the Dead.  But for now, back to Camilleri.

Nine Years Late, I Discover Andrea Camilleri

I finally started reading Andrea Camilleri after years of buying his books and I am kicking myself for having waited so long to read him.  A friend who I always listen to when it comes to fiction told me back in 2005 that she had just discovered a newly translated Sicilian crime writer and that I should keep my eye on him.  I half listened to her advice and bought Camilleri's first book (I should say his first crime novel - which he wrote at the age of 70 - after years of writing historical fiction, directing in the theater, and producing television) The Shape of Water.

I can't believe how good these books are.  In the past few weeks, I've devoured The Shape of Water, The Terra Cotta Dog, The Snack Thief, and Voice of the Violin.  I started the fifth Inspector Montalbano novel, Excursion to Tindari, last night.

I love reading police procedurals and technically, Camilleri's books follow Inspector Montalbano and the officers under him as they solve crimes in a coastal town in Sicily.  But the focus isn't so much the ins and outs of police work but a survey of modern day Italy.  The writing is often heavy on dialogue (sometimes very earthy), the pace is often brisk, and not everything is spelled out for the reader.  Reading a Montalbano story always makes me hungry - he's constantly eating good food.  So why are these books so good?  Camilleri is old and wise, bitter and funny.  Italy and Sicily provide rich source material.  And Camilleri is very clearly a fan of crime fiction and it feels as his life's work magically lead him to lay golden eggs.

I love the covers and even love the way to spines look. (None of the above pictures are mine.)

My goal is to make sure I have finished reading all of the published books this summer and be ready for the next installment in the series when it is published in September.

Voice of the Violin

"It was well known he drove like a dog on drugs."

- From Voice of the Violin by Andrea Camilleri

bookglutton goes on a diet

I have gone on a diet.  Two diets, actually.  Since August of 2012, I have lost several thousand pounds of books.  (Technically, I still have them - they are in storage.  Also, I now have storage in two states.) And now I am on a real one, the kind where you don't eat.

Last Saturday's New York Times ran a story about the latest diet to sweep the UK, the Fast Diet.  I am a sucker for concepts that feel scientifically based.  And I love the BBC.  And I love books.  So when I read that about how Michael Mosely did an episode of Horizon on intermittent fasting and turned it into a book, I thought this was the diet for me.  I watched the episode of Horizon and saw how he nicely eliminated most of the really difficult parts of fasting and was still able to get results.  And then I got the book and was further moved to believe that I could lose weight simply by restricting myself to 600 calories two days a week while eating normally the rest of the week.  (I particularly enjoyed that  he filmed the program in the US and actually ate the kind of crap that I grew up on.  The researcher in Chicago who convinces him that he can just fast two days a week drives him to a suburban hot dog and hamburger stand and they eat their food in the car.  Me in a nutshell.)

I have always been very interested in reading about food, diet, nutrition, agriculture - all of that stuff.  But I never act on any of what I read. This is a first. It is too soon to tell how this fasting regiment is working.  It is not that hard to do. It is a bit boring, though.  Of the two, I think keeping the books off will prove to be more difficult in the long run.

Bugging the Shower?

I've come across two discussions about bugging devices in two books I've read and I am having a hard time believing what is being said can still be true. Apparently it is common knowledge that you can't bug a shower.  In Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, Nick and Amy Dunne have a conversation in the shower because she is certain he has bugged their house in order to catch her admitting to certain things.  She forces him to have conversations about these certain subjects in the shower with the water on so any electronic recording devices will not be able to pick up what is said.

In Henry Bromell's Little America, Mack Hooper is a CIA operative in 1958 working in the American Embassy in Kurash, a fictional Middle Eastern country.  Through his contacts, he learns that the American Ambassador to Kurash has been covertly photographed having sex with underage boys and Mack has to decide how to handle possible fallout from the situation.  When Mack needs to discuss this predicament with his wife, where do they go to talk?  Of course, to the bathroom with the shower running.

I can believe that bugging technology circa 1958 could be foiled by the sound of running water.  But it less believable that in 2012 when Gone Girl takes place that a shower is an effective way to evade electronic eavesdropping.  Hasn't the technology improved?  Isn't there some algorithm out there that can filter out the water noise and isolated human voices?

(The closest thing to a solution to this dilemma was nearly accomplished by Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone 2.  http://youtu.be/7yatqBQWC0k)

And why anyone would ever think the shower is a safe place to be for anything is beyond me.  I think we all know why.

Menageries

I picked up five weeks of comics tonight: Mara, The Unwritten, Hellboy in Hell, Mud Man, Rachel Rising, B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth, a Lord Baltimore one-shot, Fatale, another Unwritten, Saga, The Massive, B.P.R.D. 1948, and The Walking Dead.  A very nice haul.

And I bought the March issue of Outdoor Life because I realized I had no idea how to survive a Grizzly Bear attack.  (Don't laugh.  It could happen.  I was reading about the same subject in the February issue of Backpacker.)  (Having just read about it in one magazine, you would think I wouldn't need to read about it again but I can never remember what they tell  you to do in these situations.  I should probably carry my folder of clippings with me at all times.)  And the March/April issue of Sports Afield because - well, for no good reason, really.  It just has a lot of stories about hunting in Africa.  Which has absolutely no relevance to my life (except in terms of interior decorating) but is fascinating nonetheless.

And I bought a paperback copy of Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd because I was just in a mood to buy a book and I do not own it.  I started reading a library copy last year but couldn't get into it.  But when I saw it today, I just had to have it.

Earlier in the day I got the new London Review of Books.  And my copy of the New Scientist was in the mailbox when I got home.

Before I left for the day we got four boxes of wall-hangings and decorations we ordered.  So even though I have all this cool stuff to read I won't be able to read anything tonight as I will be trying to hang decorations (and thinking about hunting).

A Happy Highsmith and a Very Unhappy Flynn

Highsmithic books are enjoyable because rooting for people caught up in difficult circumstances and doing very bad things can be fun.  But if you read too many books in this vein, and start to think about it, it can become too grim.  Like the choppping up of bodies which I just read about, at length, in Natuso Kirino's Out. Now I'm reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. The New York Times Book Review summarizes Gone Girl as "A woman disappears on the day of her fifth anniversary; is her husband a killer?" Is it Highsmithic?  Maybe.  Many reviews have mentioned Highsmith.  To me it seems more Grand Guignol than Highsmithic.  And invariably (it now seems) we get to a section where two volunteers on a search campaign looking for Amy Dunne (the titular gone girl) casually discuss the most likely way the husband got rid of the body - dumping it in the Mississppi River.  But one argues that you'd have to chop it up first, but then one wonders if the body parts wouldn't get stuck and wash up or how far would they flow before washing up.  And I thought to myself, maybe this is all a bit too much.  We can't always be talk about disposing of bodies like this.  After the detailed and technical discussions of how to dismember a body in Natsuo Kirino's Out, I think I need to read lighter fare.  On the whole, Gone Girl is an amazingly thrilling and venomous book with, perhaps, the world's two most unreliable narrators.  I thought it was a tremendously en
tertaining read and I can see why it was the fourth best-selling book (in print and e-book formats) in the US in 2012.  (Any guesses what the number 1,2,&3 best-selling books were?  For bonus points, what was number 9 and how did it relate to numbers 1,2&3?)

Which brings me to Alys, Always by Harriet Lane.  I read it because I heard good things about it.  This is hard to say without potentially spoiling the book but Francis Thorpe is scheming to insert herself into the Kyte family.  Specifically into the arms and bed of Laurence Kyte, a prominent English literary novelist whose life she enters when she comes to the aide of Kyte's wife, Alys, after a terrible automobile accident.  Part of the suspense is that we don't know what Frances Thorpe will do to do it or to what end this is all for anyway - but Thorpe (stop reading - spoiler) uses her dark deeds for a relatively benign purpose, a sort of nice, mild suprise ending.  Alys, Always ends more like Jane Eyre/Charlotte Bronte than Patricia Highsmith.  Think, Reader, I Married Him instead of Reader, I Dismembered Him (which is where I was worried the story would go).  And you know, it was refreshing and different.  She just wanted a certain life and seized upon an unusual way of achieving it.  And they all lived happily ever after.  And the only death was the car accident which starts the book.  And I went and double-checked, Francis does not cause the accident that starts the books (a would be wicked twist that I had been on the lookout for all along).