Now reading

[ezekielsdaughter]

I am still listening to/reading John LeCarre’s “The Mission Song”.

 

“Still reading” is sometimes a reproach and sometimes celebration. Am I still reading because the book is difficult to get through? Or because I don’t want to let go of beautiful prose and characters that I’ve come to love?  

 

No surprise here: I love LeCarre’s character Salvo and his lover Hannah. However, I’ve arrived at the section of the book where you cringe at the character’s actions. Salvo decides to ambush-meet his supervisor and you clutch your chair’s armrest in fear. Salvo makes a phone call to his ex-wife’s boss and you want to slap him. ‘Brother! Have you forgotten that you’re Black? These people have no loyalty to you. They only accepted your humanity in the last hundred years.’ So I listen for a while and turn the CD off. I can’t take it. The reviews on amazon.com mention the humor in the story and it’s there. But right now, all I see is the train wreck a’coming.

 

Speaking of listening—versus reading. I bought this for my trip to Houston. I always loved to rent CDs for long drives. That audio rental place has closed, but I found LeCarre’s novel on the sale rack at a bookstore. I was initially disappointed to see that LeCarre himself would not be reading the book. He’s a great reader of his own work. He does all of the accents and you can hear the class differences in his pronunciation. The actor that they hired is just as good. It’s been wonderful. I have only 1 ½ CD’S remaining. Pray for the very naïve Salvo. After all, he’s never read a LeCarre novel.