Volume 27, Number 1 · February 7, 1980
A Spy Romance
By V.S. Pritchett
Smiley's People
by John le Carré
Knopf, 374 pp., $10.95
It is not always pleasant when events of one's half-forgotten past come back in middle age, bite at the heart and stir up guilt. Ostrakova, a poor and apparently humdrum Russian woman of fifty who works in a Paris warehouse, is in fact the widow of a Russian defector who fled to Paris to join the Baltic émigrés in their struggle. She was a very young woman at the time. She was sentenced to five years in a Russian labor camp for complicity, knew she was unlikely to see her husband again, and became the mistress of a Jew she met in the camp and had a daughter by him. When amnesty is granted she gets a permit to go to France to see her husband who is dying of cancer, on condition that she report on the activities of the Paris dissidents. She has to leave her child behind as a hostage. She fakes a few reports. her husband dies, Glikman, the Jew—it turns out—dies also.
Review, 3070 words
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