Black Mischief was Evelyn Waugh’s third novel, published in 1932. It very obviously recycles material from his six-month-long trip to Ethiopia and then along the East Coast of Africa which he had chronicled in the previous year’s travelogue, Remote People (1931). The novel describes the efforts of Seth, the young English-educated Emperor of ‘Azania’, a […]
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Native Tongue by Carl Hiaasen (1991)
An irresistible convergence of violence, mayhem and mortality. (p.280 Frankie ‘the Ferret’ King was a low-level operative for the mob in New York. When he was arrested for supervising the import of a consignment of pornographic videos (which accidentally get shown to junior school children, since they were labeled as kids programmes) he happily turned […]
Posted by Simon on May 24, 2021
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/05/24/native-tongue-carl-hiaasen/
Love For Love by William Congreve (1695)
SIR SAMPSON LEGEND: You are hard to please, madam: to find a young fellow that is neither a wit in his own eye, nor a fool in the eye of the world, is a very hard task. The humour of a Restoration comedy often starts with the cast list – the names are always inventively […]
Posted by Simon on August 3, 2020
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/03/love-for-love-william-congreve/
The Realist (1918) by Hermann Broch (1931)
Incapable of communicating himself to others, incapable of breaking out of his isolation, doomed to remain the mere actor of his life, the deputy of his own ego – all that any human being can know of another is a mere symbol, the symbol of an ego that remains beyond our grasp, possessing no more […]
Posted by Simon on April 8, 2020
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/04/08/the-realist-hermann-broch/
The Day of Creation by J.G. Ballard (1987)
The sutures of my skull were opening, letting the cool wind into the chambers of my brain. I stared up at the cloudless, cyanide sky, like the domed roof of some deep psychosis. (p.275) This is a poor book. It is long, packed with detail, has an exotic setting, a reliably demented protagonist on a […]
Posted by Simon on March 5, 2020
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/03/05/the-day-of-creation-j-g-ballard/
Kingdom of Shadows by Alan Furst (2000)
Furst’s sixth novel follows the adventures of Nicholas Morath, an aristocratic Hungarian who has secured a French passport and lives in Furst’s favourite city, Paris, where he has a half share in an advertising company, the Agence Courtmain. His uncle, Count Janos Polanyi de Nemeszvar, also lives a very comfortable life in Paris. In the […]
Posted by Simon on March 30, 2016
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/03/30/kingdom-of-shadows-alan-furst/
Absolute Friends by John le Carré (2004)
‘Everyone in Berlin knows Sasha.’ (p.58) For three quarters of its length this is the best, the most compelling, gripping and psychologically rewarding le Carré novel for years: for excitement and plausibility I would recommend this one over all its predecessors as far back as A Perfect Spy. It is a return to the full-blown […]
Posted by Simon on March 14, 2016
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/absolute-friends-john-le-carre/
Charity by Len Deighton (1996)
‘You don’t like any of your old friends these days, Bernie. What’s happened to you? Why are you so caustic? Why so suspicious of everything and everyone?’ ‘Am I? Well I’m not the only one afflicted with that,’ I said. ‘There is an epidemic of suspicion and distrust. It’s contagious. We are all in its […]
Posted by Simon on January 16, 2016
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/01/16/charity-len-deighton/
Books & Boots 