Word: pym
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Some detractors describe Gates as a "chameleon" who, like Magnus Pym, the sociopathic protagonist of John le Carre's The Perfect Spy, finds it easy to match his coloration to whomever he needs to please. And while his friends disagree, they add wryly that it's better to have Gates as an employee than as a boss...
Brookner, who is often compared with Henry James and Barbara Pym, has written better novels. Her best works juxtapose exquisitely etched character miniatures against a larger canvas. In Family and Friends (1985) and Latecomers (1989), her protagonists interact with small gestures in narrow worlds, but in the background World War II looms as a haunting menace. Set in the '60s and '70s, Lewis Percy is buffeted by the winds of fads. Tissy becomes a support-group feminist ("Last week they got to know their bodies. This week they're getting in touch with the pain"), and his boss...
...extensive postwar literature of espionage and double agentry, fact and fiction tend to blur. Was Magnus Pym the name of John le Carre's perfect spy? Or was it Guy Burgess? Pym and Burgess, Donald Maclean and Toby Esterhase -- characters from the shadow world of MI6 and the KGB -- seem equally real, equally fanciful...
...Barbara Pym...
Toward the end of her life, British Novelist Barbara Pym (1913-1980) defined the "immortality most authors would want -- to feel that their work would be immediately recognisable as having been written by them and by nobody else. But of course, it's a lot to ask for!" Her extravagant request was answered. In this last collection -- all or parts of four unpublished novels, plus four stories and a radio talk -- the unmistakable Pym piquancy is everywhere. It mocks a self-centered woman in the 1940s as she awakens: "Something unpleasant had happened. And then she remembered...