Product Description: Often compared to Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, Alan Furst is a master of the spy thriller and one of the finest war novelists of our time. Published to outstanding acclaim, his novels brilliantly recreate the atmosphere and tension of the worlds of espionage and resistance in the Europe of the 1930s and the Second World War. After many years living in France and traveling as a journalist in Russia and Eastern Europe, Furst now resides in Sag Harbor, New York.
Integrity in a world gone mad As an espionage writer, Furst excels at capturing characters' emotions, and the atmosphere in which they are acting. As the action progresses from country to country, and year to year (1934-1945), each milieu has its own distinctive personality, geography and history. The overall theme is the protagonist's attempt to maintain his integrity in a world gone mad. There is a certain amount of contrivance in the plot, but the reader does not mind. Faye Berns was a fine secondary character, as was Sascha. Having read other Furst novels I was already familiar with the insanity of the Russian spy system and Stalin's government; I found the take on pre-WWII political life in a small village in Bulgaria especially enlightening.
A tour de force This is not just a great spy novel, but a great novel, period. The reader follows Khristo Stoianev on his odyssey through his recruitment by the NKVD, his work for the Soviets in the Spanish Civil War, fighting alongside the French resistance in WWII, and much more. Furst pays great attention to period detail and backs that up with great writing. I was especially impressed by his knowledge of NKVD tradecraft in the 1930's.
Epic in Scope with attention to detail Furst is one of those writers who makes every passage worth savoring. The prosaic descriptions of the minor events make this a great read. The fascinating subject matter of the eastern european perspective on the period leading up to, and during world war II make for a great story. We're carried through an extraorinary range of experiences in this book, but it never feels implausible.
Can one man's integrity amount to more than a hill of beans? As dry as the best of John Le Carre, Furst's spy and adventure tale focuses on the swelter of southeastern European borders whose twisted distant pasts and not so distant outbursts of violence have shaped the history of the world. Modern superpowers of the West have marginalized this region to their peril, and Furst does an excellent job capturing the spirits of ethnicity and nationality that arise from land and drive its spirit and soul.
Bulgarian Khristo Stoianev is recruited into the Russian spy service in 1934, grieving for a dead brother and leaving a family he would never see or communicate with again. Furst places Stoianev at the center of the hotspots of Europe in this volatile period between the two world conflicts of the 20th century--Spain during its internal test run for the alliances and military technologies that would shape the 2nd world conflict to come, Paris in the frantically vibrant and violent days before the outbreak of the war and the German occupation, at the founding of the American spy network in Europe as the fledgling CIA (then the OSS) was openly combating its German enemy but struggling with the rules and rightness of targeting its Russian allies, and finally back in the Balkans where the Germans were being pushed back toward their homeland while the distant Russian Soviet leadership was forging the iron bonds that would contain the region for the next half-century. This writer's conceit both propels the dramatic story (stories about stay-at-home Bulgarian World War II freedom fighters being pretty much a non-starter on bookstore and library shelves) and enables Furst to use his dramatic skills to draw these grand historical conflicts and characters into reader's hands in a highly-readable story.
Furst's stoic style and skill at compact descriptive writing keeps the story moving and the reader engaged. In the end, however, while Stoianev remains a hero of character and stays true to his character, I was left with the thought that in light of subsequent history his sacrifices and (ultimately his story) amounted to little. Perhaps in Furst's mind (as in, for example Le Carre's The Spy Who Came In from the Cold) this is the message of what is left of the horror shows of the 20th century--while the problems of one little person (or three) don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, one can only do what one can with personal integrity and diligent effort and leave the results to history.
An interesting study in comparison and contrast might be William T. Vollman's Europe Central, where the abilities and actions of the leaders and elites also seem to amount to nothing against the collapse of civilization in Germany and Russia in those turbulent times.
Furst at his best I've read and own quite a lot of Furst books and this one was my favorite. I was truly captivated by the story and had a hard time putting the book down. A good story coupled with real history make this book a winner.
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