Synopses & Reviews
Through a series of improbable coincidences in the early 1970s Harry Mathews then living in France was commonly reputed to be a CIA agent. Even his closest friends had their suspicions which were only reinforced each time he tried to deny such a connection. With growing frustration at his inability to make anyone believe him Mathews decided to act the part. My Life in CIA documents Mathews's experiences as a would-be spy during 1973 where amid charged world events the coup in Chile Watergate the ending of the Vietnam War he found himself engaged in a game that took sinister twists as various foreign agencies were interested in him for their own dubious purposes. Harry Mathews has turned these strange events into a spellbinding thriller that relentlessly blurs the line between fact and fiction.
Review
"[N]o matter the rough edges of its spy-novel mechanics, My Life in CIA is extremely appealing....[A] book that's easy to like, an unusual pleasure: an American expatriate spy fantasy, and a very entertaining novel." The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Unlikely...are the twists and turns his fictional memoir takes, punctuated by little cloak-and-dagger episodes and even a spectacular moment of wetwork among the wine-and-cheese picnics al fresco....[A] lot of fun." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Its outrageous that an educated man and a gifted writer like Mr. Mathews could make such a public confession of such shameful activities." Q. Kuhlmann author of The Eye of Anguish: Subversive Activity in the German Democratic Republic
Review
"This is an honest account by someone (he seems at the time to have been a bit of a neer-do-well) who tried to play spy without knowing what the word meant and landed himself in boiling-hot water. The book which is as exciting as any novel proves a useful moral: leave this business to the pros." Colonel Raymond Russell (ret.) Counterintelligence Corps U.S. Army
Synopsis
In the early 1970s, Harry Mathews, then living in France, was commonly reputed to be a CIA agent--and so he decided to act the part. Part spellbinding thriller, part gag, this memoir documents Mathews's experiences as a would-be spy during the coup in Chile, Watergate, and the close of the Vietnam War, when various foreign agencies decided he would have to be liquidated....
About the Author
Harry Mathews was born and raised on New York's Upper East Side but left America for France in 1952 shortly after graduating from Harvard. He has written over a dozen books including the novels Cigarettes The Journalist and Tlooth along with collected stories The Human Country and essays The Case of the Persevering Maltese. Mathews is also the only American member of the Oulipo the Workshop for Potential Literature France's longest and most active literary movement. Currently he divides his time between Paris Key West and New York.