📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carré
I believe this is the third time I’ve read this book, and I’ve also enjoyed its BBC television and radio adaptations a lot. The first time I read it, I didn’t get it, the second time I loved it, and this time I see why it’s such a classic. It was fun to read the original after watching and listening to the adaptations pretty regularly over the past several years. Le Carré does well with detail, and I’d forgotten the subplots and side comments that get left out—but that add so much to the characters, the plot, and the overall feel of the book. That said, there were times when some of those details felt extraneous (i.e., the compressed adaptations don’t suffer for their absence), and fifty years on, Jerry Westerby’s running joke with Smiley about Indigenous Americans is cringeworthy. It’s amazing sometimes how Europeans sometimes feel more racist toward American Indians than we in the U.S. are.
You can use click on the <
button in the top-right of your browser window to read and write comments on this post with Hypothesis. You can read more about how I use this software here.