Book review Friday, November 18, 2016 The writer who came in from the coldBy Nicolás MeyerFor The HeraldIt takes a special kind of talent to write an engrossing autobiography of 450-plus pages while talking mainly about others until page 387. But then, David Cornwell — who parlayed a few years in minor intelligence work into a lifetime as a writer of top-notch spy fiction, under the name John le Carré — is a born storyteller, and has a lot of stories to tell. Le Carré emerges as essentially a moralist, forever shocked at cruelty and cynical behaviour even though he has been studying them and writing about them all his life. Reclaiming episodesIn these memoirs le Carré explicitly seeks to “reclaim” some episodes told in a recent biography of him. The latter’s author, Adam Sisman, has averred that the present book may embellish some facts; le Carré says that “nowhere have I consciously falsified” anything.

Source: Bueno Aires Herald November 18, 2016 18:33 UTC