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The Liar

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Edit een dag later: het onontkoombare gevolg is, dat ik het boek nu uit heb. Dit is het meest hilarische boek dat ik in jaren gelezen heb. Maar niet voor romantische zielen of personen die nog enig geloof in de mensheid hebben overgehouden. Die zouden zich maar geschoffeerd voelen. The novel has a cynical and ironic tone which only a British novel can have, but it ultimately also has a heart. And despite the fact that the novel is twenty years old, it doesn’t feel dated. The sign of a good read, surely, is also that the reader immediately wants to read something else by the author, and this is exactly how I feel right now. As much as I enjoy (nay, love) reading, however, I would prefer an audio-version again when it comes to Stephen Fry’s writing; his reading aloud is simply priceless. So, what actually is the game? Is Fry aiming for a certain effect, or is this just a lazily tossed-off first novel which fails to hang together only because its author failed to care? Taken individually, I found all the chapters to be at least reasonably entertaining. There aren't too many other novels that I would think of in terms of which chapter was my favorite (it's Chapter Six—I highly recommend it and suspect it would remain quite enjoyable if you read it alone and gave the rest of the book a miss). Taken as a whole, the book fails miserably to cohere into any meaningful narrative. There's no great character arc, which I also love. There's a believable one. He's had a life-changing experience, but he's also set in his ways. He's a better man. It is just possible that this is the point: that a life which is the product of lies will inevitably be, on the whole, unsatisfactory, no matter how charming and diverting it may seem at any given moment. That the expert liar's power, derived by manipulation of others' perception, is bought through surrendering the ability to form real human relationships. It is also possible that I was desperate to read some meaning into a hopelessly shallow text.

He spends too much of the book flexing his encyclopaedic knowledge to no point at all, which is great in the context of a show like QI, but when it’s interspersed with a story you’re struggling to engage with, the result feels like trying to watch a pirated film in the mid-2000’s while constantly swatting away unsolicited pop-up ads.

Ik lees Het Nijlpaard van Stephen Fry. IN VERTALING. De omvang van deze ramp dringt slechts langzaamaan tot mij door. Het betekent dat ik nooit, NOOIT meer deze orgie van schuttingtaal, grotesk cynisme en platte seks, deze in vitriool, drijfmest en tien jaar oude whisky gedrenkte bladzijden voor de volle 100% zal kunnen smaken in de oorspronkelijke taal. Ik moet onmiddellijk stoppen met lezen tot ik een Engelse versie heb. MAAR IK KAN NIET STOPPEN! After losing his job at newspaper, Tedward's goddaughter engages him to spy on the family of Tedward's old army friend in Norfolk. Initially, there does not seem to be anything worth reporting to his goddaughter but as the story develops, Tedward becomes close to his godson who seems to be a bit of outcast and who also seems to be at the centre of some mysterious events. Weird, but compelling, because the main character, poet Edward Lennox Wallace (Tedward), is a cantankerous, misogynistic, drunken snob who becomes the unlikely investigator of a country house mystery. I found the writing style easy to read and the story entertaining. It was funny in some places, poignant in others. I particularly enjoyed the histories of the characters and the relationships between them.

On that note, I agree with another reviewer in here that Stephen Fry could read aloud an IKEA instruction manual and I would probably still be enthralled. His language often strikes me as so much verbal bravado, underlined by his English public school pronunciation in the audio version, yet he can get away with it; in fact, I suppose that is his style, really. And it’s not just words. There are hundreds of facts, opinions and questions, all idiosyncratically Fry-esque, squeezed into the dialogue that I almost had to push the stop button a few times simply to digest something before moving on (just as I had to stop it once in a while when I didn’t catch what he was saying because I had started laughing). Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67 on arrival Show more Midwestern American airport greater _____ area. Flight _____. Date _____. Priority mission top success to complete. Code name: Operation Havoc.” A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. This was actually only the first book from Stephen Fry that I actually read. I have several others waiting for me, because who doesn't love Stephen Fry? (Well, okay, probably quite a few people, but I think he is smart, funny and tends to make me learn new things, too.)The book is noted [ weaselwords] for its wit and humour, as well as its often outrageous references to various homosexual experiences. Stephen Fry’s voice has always been described as “authoritative” and “utterly distinctive”. In this post, I have included the 34 best audiobooks narrated by Stephen Fry. Later, Adrian, the liar, a cheat when opportunity provides, and now a delightfully suave charmer of boys and girls alike, finds his match at Cambridge in his senior tutor, the ebullient Professor Donald Trefusis who, bored with Adrian’s plagiarism, tasks him to create “a piece of work that contains even the seed of novelty, the ghost of a shred of scintilla of a germ of a suspicion of an iota of a shadow of a particle of something interesting and provoking, something that will amuse and astonish”. If Adrian can turn in one original idea, Trefusis will let Adrian off the hook for any further work. A challenge he can’t resist, Adrian ropes in his nearest and dearest, much like his escapades at private school, to complete his scheme. While their mentor/mentee relationship with its transgenerational bromance is a bit cliché, what unfolds is is an amusing and fortuitous tale in which Adrian presents his thesis of sorts and Trefusis grooms his protégé. There are couplings, games, journeys, eye-wincing injuries, Roundheads, spaniels, beets and roots before the witty gathering where the secret is revealed and the reader left aghast. am I so different from anyone else?…Doesn’t everyone just rearrange patterns? Ideas can’t be created or destroyed, surely.’

After graduation, Adrian attends a farcical meeting where he and other attendees discuss the arrest of Trefusis, who was arrested on charges of cottaging, sabotaging the footage of an onlooking BBC film crew. It is later revealed that he was actually undertaking a document exchange preceded by two kisses on the cheek as is custom in several European countries, such as Hungary. Stephen Fry ranks among my favourite persons on earth. There's something about his terribly English combination of wit, erudition and a dirty mind that never fails to delight me, and it shines brightly in The Liar, the first of the four novels he has published so far. An irreverent and intelligent take on such British institutions as the public-school novel, the Cambridge novel and the spy novel, it is best appreciated by people who have an affinity for such things, but really, anyone with a taste for British humour should enjoy it. It's basically a late-twentieth-century P.G. Wodehouse update with some smut thrown in for good measure, and if that doesn't appeal to you, you're not a proper Anglophile. The spirits of Oscar Wilde and Evelyn Waugh glower benignly over this very funny first novel . . . An ingenious plot filled with surprises and glittering with hilarious, often indecent inventions.” Mr. Fry’s book is wonderfully funny and (as funny weren’t enough) absorbingly plotted. His characters are witty and endearing and his dialogue will leave you grinning with delight even as you wonder a shade wistfully why none of your friends can talk this way.” The moral, if there is one, is that it's okay to live life in any way you want to, so long as you remember there isn't anyone to save you or fix you but yourself.

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Inspired by the writings of Stefan Zweig, The Grand Budapest Hotel recreates a by-gone era through its arresting visuals and sparkling dialogue. The charm and vibrant colours of the film gradually darken with a sense of melancholy as the forces of history conspire against a vanishing world Wodehouse could not have written this, however. Not enough fun, and too much sex. Including all sorts of odd couplings, some of which are uncomfortable to think about. Each chapter weaves together a series of lies and truths which leave the reader guessing what is true and what is orchestrated until the pieces are slowly pulled loose. Are Adrian’s tastes really so catholic? Who murdered the Hungarian violinist? (And why was Adrian a witness?) What disentangles is a plot ripe with murder, intrigue, rivalry—all manhandled by a pot of unreliable narrators. At last, Tina Fey's story can be told. From her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on Saturday Night Live; from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life as a mother eating things off the floor; from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon — from the beginning of this paragraph to this final sentence. Is it dirty? Absolutely. Is the protagonist an egotistical, whiskey-soaked, misogynist? Absolutely. Remember...this is a work of fiction and try not to get all uppity about some cursing and lewd language. Don't forget that some of the best, and now, most respected works of art, literature, music and theater were considered base, vile, subversive and, dare I say it, sacrilegious in their own days and have come to be regarded as classics and mainstays of our modern times.

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