{"id":91883,"date":"2025-07-25T17:03:18","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T17:03:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/91883\/"},"modified":"2025-07-25T17:03:18","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T17:03:18","slug":"the-books-briefing-what-john-le-carre-learned-in-corfu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/91883\/","title":{"rendered":"The Books Briefing: What John le Carr\u00e9 Learned in Corfu"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors\u2019 weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.<\/a><\/p>\n

Many of my most memorable reading experiences are conflated with incongruous settings. I first picked up Slaughterhouse-Five<\/a> in Venice, on the recommendation of a fellow backpacker. I read Death in Venice<\/a>, however, in Amsterdam, where the canals thinly evoked Thomas Mann\u2019s pestilent waterways. And if you ask me about San Sebasti\u00e1n, the lovely Basque seaside town, I\u2019ll flash back to the mind-blowing middle section of Cloud Atlas<\/a>, which is set in postapocalyptic Hawaii. For authors, too, a place can serve as more of a catalyst than a setting. They go somewhere on holiday and end up learning something about their characters\u2014or themselves. This is what happened to John le Carr\u00e9 in Corfu, and it\u2019s why, for this week\u2019s installment of The Atlantic\u2019s literary-travel series, \u201cThe Writer\u2019s Way<\/a>,\u201d Honor Jones chose to investigate<\/a> le Carr\u00e9\u2019s 600-page masterpiece, A Perfect Spy<\/a>, by traveling to a place that takes up only a few pages in the novel.<\/p>\n

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic\u2019s Books section:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you wanted to write about le Carr\u00e9 and travel, you could go almost anywhere,\u201d Jones explains: \u201cVienna or Bern or Kenya or Cornwall would make the list long before Corfu.\u201d But consider the predicament of le Carr\u00e9\u2019s protagonist, Magnus, an MI6 agent who has betrayed his country to the Communist Czechs and is lying low in Greece under cover of a family vacation. \u201cIf you\u2019re trying to find someone who doesn\u2019t want to be found, you don\u2019t go to the obvious places,\u201d Jones writes. \u201cYou ignore the booked flight to Washington and the train ticket to Paris because you know they\u2019re false leads. You look where the trail is colder.\u201d<\/p>\n

Le Carr\u00e9 himself had a chance encounter in Corfu that made its way into A Perfect Spy, in a scene that opens up a central theme of the novel\u2014the legacy of a father (Magnus\u2019s but also le Carr\u00e9\u2019s) who was a monstrous, charismatic narcissist. It was on the Greek island that le Carr\u00e9 ran into a man who\u2019d worked for his father, a globe-trotting con artist. \u201cWe was all bent, son,\u201d the former henchman told him. \u201cBut your dad was very, very bent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because great novels are rarely on the nose, le Carr\u00e9 sets a fictionalized version of this encounter in England. Corfu instead becomes the place where Magnus\u2019s Czech contact, the mysterious Axel, tries to entice the Brit to join him behind the Iron Curtain. The island, for centuries beset by repeated invasions and then an onslaught of tourism, holds broader thematic significance for Jones: \u201cCorfu is a good place to think about influence and identity, about how so many disparate fragments can cohere into a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n

As it happens, I\u2019m going to stop in Bern next week on a European rail vacation. The Swiss city takes up many more pages in A Perfect Spy than Corfu does; it\u2019s where Magnus, as a very young man, first meets Axel. But I\u2019ve already read the novel, so I\u2019ll pack a different one. Inspired by The Atlantic<\/a>\u2019s new list<\/a> of staffers\u2019 recommendations for must-read books, I\u2019m going to finally dig into Hernan Diaz\u2019s Trust<\/a>, which is set primarily<\/a> in New York. So although I\u2019ll be in Europe, I\u2019ll probably be thinking of home.<\/p>\n

\"PhotoA narrow street in Corfu\u2019s Old Town Alice Zoo for The Atlantic<\/p>\n

Chasing le Carr\u00e9 in Corfu<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Honor Jones<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re trying to find someone who doesn\u2019t want to be found, you don\u2019t go to the obvious places.<\/p>\n

Read the full article.<\/a><\/p>\n

What to Read<\/b><\/p>\n

Ravelstein<\/a>, by Saul Bellow<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bellow\u2019s thinly veiled 2000 roman \u00e0 clef about his friendship with the star academic Allan Bloom\u2014the philosopher who wrote the best-selling jeremiad The Closing of the American Mind\u2014is a tender portrait of its subject. But Bellow\u2019s novel is as much about the institutional culture that shaped Bloom. It is a paean to academia as an enterprise that works to sort ideas that are base and quotidian from those that are noble and timeless, and its titular character embodies this faith in the professoriate as a kind of secular priesthood. Abe Ravelstein is a study in contradictions. Devoted to a life of the mind, he approaches reading the classics as a kind of soul-craft, and he\u2019s preoccupied with the wisdom of ancient philosophers, poets, and statesmen; yet he also nurtures an irrepressible fondness for modern luxuries such as Armani suits, Cuban cigars, and \u201csolid-gold Montblanc pens.\u201d The irony of Ravelstein is that its protagonist\u2019s celebrity is a symptom of the same commodification of knowledge that is eroding the things he most holds dear. Read 25 years later, the novel is an artifact of its time: The diminishment of the university\u2019s purpose that Bellow witnessed feels much more advanced today.\u00a0 \u2014 Tyler Austin Harper<\/p>\n

From our list: Eight books that explain the university crisis<\/a><\/p>\n

Out Next Week<\/b><\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcda Flashout<\/a>, by Alexis Soloski<\/a><\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcda Kicking the Hornet\u2019s Nest: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East From Truman to Trump<\/a>, by Daniel E. Zoughbie<\/a><\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcda The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive<\/a>, by Mathelinda Nabugodi<\/a><\/p>\n

Your Weekend Read<\/strong>\"AA24<\/p>\n

When It Feels Good to Root for a Bad Guy<\/strong><\/p>\n

By David Sims<\/p>\n

The local sheriff in Eddington, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), is the film\u2019s Bickle, though his final showdown is a far more absurd spectacle than the one in Taxi Driver. Aster\u2019s film is frightening, yes\u2014but it\u2019s a dark and lacerating comedy first and foremost, playing out the power fantasies that fueled many an online conspiracy theory in the pandemic\u2019s early days (and still do now). And although Cross may not be as crushingly lonely as Bickle, he does share the character\u2019s escalating sense of paranoia. By plunging the viewer into this chaotic inner world, Aster illustrates the dissonant appeal of being enmeshed in the perspective of, and maybe even rooting for, an individual committed to their belief in justice\u2014even if that commitment can border on sordid.<\/p>\n

Read the full article.<\/a><\/p>\n

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.<\/p>\n

Sign up for The Wonder Reader,<\/a> a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.<\/p>\n

Explore all of our newsletters<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors\u2019 weekly guide to the best in books. Sign…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":91884,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-91883","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114914957972434795","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}