Oz on the Spy's Life

The Mr.and Mrs.Buce Readaloud Circle is immured in Amos Oz' To Know a Woman. It is more or less of an impulse choice. I had never read Oz. Mrs. Buce had read Tale of Love and Silence and loved it. This one was handy, so we gave it a whirl.

We're not deep enough in yet for me to have got the story arc, but I must say (a) it feels like Israel, even though he offers very little by way of physical description; and (b) he's precise and economical in particulars, and he never seems to set a foot wrong. Here, for example, an Oz character recalls a spy's life even duller than George Smiley's:

According to a calculation he had once made in his head, he had spent approximately ninety-five per cent of all the hours of his professional life, the hours that made up twenty-three years in all, in airports, on board aircraft, in trains and stations, in taxis, in waiting rooms, in hotel rooms, in hotel lobbies, in casinos, on street corners, in restaurants, in darkened cinemas, in cafes, in gambling clubs, in public libraries, in post offices. … He almost always wore a conventional gray suit. He had got into the habit of traveling the world with a single suitcase and a bag that never contained so much as a tube of toothpaste, a shoelace, or a scrap of paper made in Israel. He had got into the habit of killing whole days alone with his own thoughts.

-Amos Oz, To Know a Woman 39-40
(Nicholas de Lange trans. 1991)

Hm, I wonder where I have spent 95 percent of my professional life. No, skip it, I’d rather not calculate.