A Lovely Day in Zurich and a Disappointing Movie

     It’s been a month since my last posting. I plead post-vacation email catch-up as an excuse. Like so many people these days, I tried to keep up on my work-email while on vacation but all I managed to do was stem the tide. I’ve decided that for every week you take off, it takes an additional week of working extra hard to catch up. In my case, I took a month off. So it goes…

     My wife was traveling on business on Valentine’s Day so we didn’t celebrate it until the following Saturday. We then went to our favorite Zurich restaurant Tres Kilos (Rulon’s second favorite after The Desperado),– a wonderful, yes, Mexican restaurant only a few blocks away from the American consulate in Zurich. Those of you who read Einstein’s Trunk will remember that Tres Kilos is where Rulon took Yohaba after the killing in the Honggerberg forest.

     Before dinner we did a walking/window shopping tour of Zurich, stopped at the Storchen hotel for the best hot chocolate in the world (and at $9.50 for a somewhat small by American standards cup, maybe one of the most expensive) and then had some glazed, chocolate covered orange slices from a nearby Springli chocolate store.

     After dinner, as an extra treat, we saw a movie we’d been chomping at the bit to see ever since we heard about it: The remake of Tinker, Tailor… starring Gary Oldham as George Smiley, the aged, bespeckled, overweight spy, based on the novel by John LeCarre.

            Alas, the movie was a disappointment. I’m sure the producers, actors, and directors did what they thought was best, but the 1979 BBC Alec Guinness mini-series, I’m afraid, has set a very, very high bar. It was so unbelievably good. There were so many scenes in the six-hour BBC version that were so well constructed, that maybe this new two-hour movie never stood a chance. In any case, there wasn’t a single scene in the new movie that was as powerful as the comparable scene in the original. Also, while it must have been a real challenge for the movie to condense the book to only two hours, I felt they had superfluous scenes, that if they had not been there, they could have had more time for LeCarre’s priceless dialogue. The book was not about men staring silently while they tracked down the mole in British Intelligence. The book was about Smiley’s relentless interrogations of his co-workers to finally arrive at the truth. Again, we see that making good movies is extremely difficult. There are so many mistakes that can be made. When a team gets it right, they should be applauded.    

     Next week: for my birthday, my wife bought me an Apple Macbook Air. I will talk about my experience and wax lyrical on changes in the IT industry.  

Best regards,

Jim

Zurich

A Preview of 'World of Hurt'

     The sequel to Einstein's Trunk is complete - or, let's just say, the tinkering and re-writing has slowed to a minimum.
     Maybe it's a common tendency of authors to always think their latest book is their best - but the truth is, I'm very pleased with how World of Hurt has turned out. The humor is still there, the beginning is snappier, and Rulon is still Rulon. The one big difference is that Yohaba comes more into her own. In fact, for about 60% of the book, she is the driving character.
     I can't say much without giving away the plot, but I will say that there is still some suspence around Elsa colliding with the earth, and the Russians haven't given up on dealing with Rulon after he took out their Spetsnaz team in CERN. But there is also an ensemble of new villians that, as happens in so many thrillers, just happen to gravitate towards the hero like yellow jackets at a picnic. The story begins in Idaho, but then the action moves to Zurich where some old scores get settled.
     I like to include in my thrillers a little intellectual/educational meat. In ET it was the information around asteroids, CERN, and nuclear weapons. In WOH the educational side comes out as Rulon deals with some local neo-Nazis and has a chance to observe first hand the rhetorical tactics first developed by their discredited Fuhrer as he spread the Nazi message in the beer halls of Munich in the '20s and '30s.
     Embedded in WOH is also my pride in the state of Idaho. As a native New Yorker, it was never clear when I moved to Idaho in the late '80s that I would be able to adjust. Let's face it - NY and Idaho are practically polar opposites in many ways. And initially it was an adjustment. But eventually I came to love Idaho and that hard as woodpecker lips toughness you see in many of the long time ranchers - just the sort of people that Rulon grew up with. I hope my love of Idaho is evident in WOH, just as my appreciation of Zurich and Switzerland may have come out in ET.

All the best,

Jim

Zurich