Word: russia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...RUSSIA HOUSE by John le Carre (Knopf; $19.95). A document discounting Soviet missile capabilities is smuggled to the West. Never mind glasnost, perestroika and the cold war thaw. Are these grubby notebooks full of facts and figures true? The quest for the answer produces the author's most hair- raising thriller since The Spy Who Came In from the Cold...
...RUSSIA HOUSE by John le Carre; Knopf; 353 pages...
Nothing was wrong with it, of course, and it is back for sure in The Russia House. Scarcely a dozen pages into this novel, Le Carre's twelfth, a document of potentially enormous importance has been passed from East to West during an exhibit of audiocassette wares in Moscow. Three grubby notebooks full of highly technical drawings and mathematical notations also contain some eye- popping assertions: "The American strategists can sleep in peace. Their nightmares cannot be realised. The Soviet knight is dying inside his armour." If true, such statements and the accompanying evidence pointing out the military incompetence...
...monitoring his every move but for the readers as well. With scarcely an intimation of sex, no violence and not a side arm visible, Le Carre has again managed to construct a plot of commanding suspense. Never before has he so successfully merged his narrative and contemplative gifts. The Russia House is both afire and thought provoking, a thriller that demands a second reading as a treatise on our times...
...Russia House mixes spying and glasnost, commanding suspense and a treatise on our times. -- Primo Levi's essays distill a mind of rare quality...