Acquired:
Here Lies, Eric Ambler
Passage of Arms, Eric Ambler
Martin Amis: The Biography, Richard Bradford
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, Selina Hastings
Vigil, George Saunders
Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart

Offloaded:
The Intercom Conspiracy, Eric Ambler
Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
The Emperor of Ice Cream, Brian Moore
Pagan, W.F. Morris

Progress Made:
Cause for Alarm, Eric Ambler
The Courts of the Morning, John Buchan
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, Selina Hastings

Finished:
The Intercom Conspiracy, Eric Ambler
Other People, Martin Amis
The Razor’s Edge, W.S. Maugham
The Woman Who Married a Bear, John Straley

“D’you remember how Jesus was led into the wilderness and fasted forty days? Then, when he was a-hungered, the devil came to him and said: If thou be the son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But Jesus resisted the temptation. Then the devil set him on a pinnacle of the temple and said to him: If thou be the son of God, cast thyself down. For angels had charge of him and would bear him up. But again Jesus resisted. Then the devil took him into a high mountain and showed him the kingdoms of the world and said the he would give them to him if he would fall down and worship him. But Jesus said: Get thee hence, Satan. That’s the end of the story according to good simple Matthew. But it wasn’t. The devil was sly and he came to Jesus once more and said: If thou wilt accept shame and disgrace, scourging, a crown of thorns and death on the cross, thou shalt save the human race, for a greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Jesus fell. The devil laughed till his sides ached, for he knew the evil men would commit in the name of their redeemer.”

Isabel looked at me indignantly.

“Where on earth did you get that?”

“Nowhere. I’ve invented it on the spur of the moment.”

—W.S. Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

The Razor’s Edge is an odd duck of a book. It’s structured like a memoir, with Maugham narrating in the first person, but all the other characters are either composites or wholesale inventions. W.S. himself was coy about which it was, and who if anyone might have served as models, with the result that several people have made dubious claims of serving as the basis for the pivotal character of Larry.

It was annoyingly hard to find information about this online, with the result that I broke down and bought Selina Hastings’ biography. So far it is pretty good, thorough without getting bogged down in details; though it has yet to address the key question of why Maugham, who professed to detest his middle name, chose it as his literary moniker.

At this same time I realized I was curious about other writers I’d been reading, and next thing I knew I was ordering a Martin Amis bio and Eric Ambler’s cleverly titled autobiography. And so it goes. Add those to the Vonnegut book I’ve yet to finish, and we see again that the great project will never be completed.

At least I did manage to dispose of few things this month. Some of those were duplicates and one was a book sent to me accidentally by an eBay seller, but fuck, it’s something.

Other People is considered the last book of Amis’s early period, just before he came into his prime. I almost gave up on it in the first few pages, which were fragmented and disorienting — but that turned out to be on purpose, as the book is about an amnesia victim gradually finding herself again. Which is a hoary old device, but he puts a fresh spin on it, and this was a quick and enjoyable read. The ending was a bit muddled, but why quibble? I look forward to Money, which is supposed to be the first of his masterpieces.

The Straley book was lent to me by a friend, and though I found a lot to like about it — it’s an idiosyncratic detective novel with an endearingly unreliable narrator — somehow it didn’t quite hit me in the sweet spot. I quickly retreated to Ambler, and The Intercom Conspiracy did not disappoint. This is a sort of sequel to A Coffin for Dimitrios, though written much later, and plays lots of fun games with form and point of view.

Currently I am bouncing back and forth between Cause for Alarm, which is top-drawer Ambler, easy to pick up and hard to put down, and The Courts of the Morning, which I’m finding a wee bit of a slog. Where Buchan’s The 39 Steps was spare and focused, Courts is rambling and disjointed. But I’m sticking with it for the time being, optimist that I am.

June is usually a good reading month, with long summer days well-suited to finishing off half-read books, of which I have many. Over and out for now.