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Loading... Single & Singleby John Le Carré
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Tolle Leistung des Übersetzers: Die 2 Sterne gebe ich vor allem dem Übersetzer. Das Buch selber ist z.T. extrem langatmig, von unwesentlichen Dingen und langen aber oft wenig dienlichen Dialogen überfrachtet. Die langatmig aufgebaute Spannung verpufft quasi auf den letzten 10 Seiten extrem schnell und enttäuschend. Das Buch ist nur mäßig unterhaltend.  r1hard | Nov 22, 2009 |  Great story. (  ) jaygheiser | Jul 23, 2008 | Although LeCarre can still conjure up the right atmosphere of dread and understated violence, his plotting here is pretty weak. Oliver Single, son of international "entrepreneur" Tiger Single, is just shocked to find out that his father has built his finance firm by facilitating some pretty shady practices. So Single the younger goes to the authorities, etc., who put him through the witness relocation/new life kind of thing. A few years later a major deal goes bad for dad, who ends up disappearing ... has he just gone to ground? Do the evil Georgians have him? Single Jr., wallowing in Oedipal nuttiness, hooks up with some of England's finest to save the day! But really, ol' Tiger is just another international high-finance criminal w/o a "single" redeeming quality, so why should we care about him again? Ollie, on the other hand, must have something going on ... he's able to get two highly unlikely women to fall in love with him based pretty much on ... nothing. And let's not even mention Oliver's elder/perfect brother, dad's favorite, who conveniently died of leukemia before being able to grow up and take the reins at Single. Sigh. Somewhere, George Smiley is rolling in his grave. (  ) KromesTomes | Jul 18, 2007 | This novel of international money-laundering and organized crime continues to show how adaptable John le Carre is as a writer. Although well-known for his Cold-War-era spy novels, he does a great job of moving into new territory with this and his other recent works. I admired the main character, Oliver Single, who is in hiding from his father, who he had earlier betrayed to HM Customs as the story begins. However, the unfolding of his history is a little slow to occur and could result in reader confusion; it is not linear and gives this aspect of the story an unnecessarily convoluted progression. Many of the secondary characters are one-dimensional, including Customs officer Brock and love-interest Aggie but it is only Oliver the reader needs to care about. I liked the father-son tension throughout the book and I was not sure Oliver would succeed in locating his father or whether the reunion would be a happy one. But the resolution was too short and abrupt; the book ends just as things are happening, before the reader quite grasps what is going on, and what eventually happens to the major parties is left unsaid. However, the spy-craft is well integrated into and does not steal the show from the human side of the show. The bad guys are sufficiently bad, the good guys sufficiently human, the locales sufficiently exotic to make this a very enjoyable read. (  ) Pferdina | Feb 18, 2007 | This one is good. The complicated twists and turns of the plot are classic le Carre. (  ) johnthefireman | Aug 7, 2006 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0671027972, Mass Market Paperback)On a Turkish hillside, ex-Communist mobsters shatter the skull of a corrupt English lawyer. In a sleepy English village, the authorities ask a lonely children's magician how come £5,000,030 sterling just got anonymously deposited in his baby daughter's bank account. With machine-like logic and soulful literary magic, John le Carré links these two events in Single & Single, a stay-up-all-night thriller.The magician is Oliver Single, the tormented son of Tiger Single, a rogue banker the Financial Times calls "the knight errant of Gorbachev's New East." In fact, Tiger is sinking his fangs into that crucial one-tenth of world trade free of pesky regulations--illegal drugs--and secretly selling donated disaster-relief blood. Mum's the word in Tiger's mob: as the lawyer's executioner notes, "Is not convenient to hear that American capitalists are bleeding poor nations literally." Oliver comes in from the cold to help spymaster Brock track Tiger down. That £30 sterling signified Judas's silver, but Oliver yearns to save Tiger's life, too. Le Carré wizardly juggles dozens of characters in a zigzag, globetrotting plot. You-are-there realism, narrative drive, pitch-perfect dialog--why can't movies be this good? Like lightning, le Carré's metaphors both dazzle and blazingly illuminate the world. Ex-spy le Carré was there when the Berlin Wall went up, and his spy craft is legendarily realistic. His female spy/love interest is less so--the opposite of a femme fatale, she might be termed a "deus sex machina." But the book's crucial father-son relationship is quite real, because, like the irresistible villain of A Perfect Spy, Tiger is based on le Carré's own con-man dad. The cold war is over, but le Carré is hot. And he will endure. --Tim Appelo (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:22 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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