Ashenden o el agente secreto
Language: Spanish
Pages: 198
ISBN: B0062XE6P4
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Basado en las experiencias de Somerset Maugham como agente secreto del espionaje británico en Europa durante la Primera Guerra Mundial, Ashenden o el agente secreto se compone de una serie de relatos encadenados que reflejan a la perfección la rudeza y brutalidad del espionaje, sus intrigas y traiciones y, sobre todo, el absurdo de su existencia.
El tono y la estructura de esta novela, concebida como un mosaico, ha sido un modelo para los escritores que, como Raymond Chandler o Dashiell Hammet, desarrollaron el género con posterioridad.
that disaster awaits me. I am a brave man, but sometimes I have reached this stage and not had the courage to look at the four vital cards.’ Indeed now he eyed the backs of them with an anxiety he did not try to hide. ‘What was I saying to you?’ ‘You were telling me that women found your fascinations irresistible?’ replied Ashenden dryly. ‘Once all the same I found a woman who resisted me. I saw her first in a house, a casa de mujeres in Mexico City, she was going down the stairs as I went
whom its temptations are held out too suddenly. R., that shrewd, cynical man, was captivated by the vulgar glamour and the shoddy brilliance of the scene before him. Just as the advantage of culture is that it enables you to talk nonsense with distinction, so the habit of luxury allows you to regard its frills and furbelows with a proper contumely. But when they had eaten their luncheon and were drinking their coffee Ashenden, seeing that R. was mellowed by the good meal and his surroundings,
thought an Indian could turn that colour,’ he said), and turned it over and over in his hand as though he could not understand what his own letter was doing there. Tears sprang to his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. (‘It was grotesque, he’s fat, you know.’) He said something in a language the man did not understand and then in French asked him when the boat went to Thonon. When he got on board he looked about, but did not see him, then he caught sight of him, huddled up in an ulster with his hat
been separated from them and every morning he wrote a long letter to his wife telling her everything that had happened and a good deal of what he had said during the day. Ashenden watched him cover sheet after sheet of paper with his neat, legible and precise handwriting. Mr. Harrington had read all the books on conversation and knew its technique to the last detail. He had a little book in which he noted down the stories he heard and he told Ashenden that when he was going out to dinner he
pages and pages, in which Dostoievsky would have described the situation. He knew the lacerations his characters would have suffered, the broken bottles of champagne, the visits to the gipsies, the vodka, the swoonings, the catalepsy and the long, long speeches everyone would have made. It was all very dreadful and wonderful and shattering. ‘It would make us horribly unhappy,’ said Anastasia Alexandrovna, ‘but I don’t know what else he could do. I couldn’t ask him to live without me. He would be