Can one man's integrity amount to more than a hill of beans?

books:


	• Night Soldiers: A Novel Alan Furst Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2002 - 480 pages average customer review:based on 56 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

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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.

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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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Recommended For Those Who Know History

This was my "first" Furst novel. Given to me as a gift several years ago, it worked its way to the top of my read "stack." What a pleasant surprise! An excellent novel. A great spy story, with characters that are interesting and nicely developed. I would highly recommend it. But be forewarned that it helps, greatly, to have some knowledge of 1930's Europe and the war-before-the-war among fascism, communism, and democracy. It will add a lot to enjoyment of the book. A friend knew virtually nothing of the era and put the book down after reading only the first chapter.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Bulgaria, 1934. A young man is murdered by the local fascists. His brother, Khristo Stoianev, is recruited into the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence service, and sent to Spain to serve in its civil war. Warned that he is about to become a victim of Stalin?s purges, Khristo flees to Paris. Night Soldiers masterfully re-creates
the European world of 1934?45: the struggle between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia for Eastern Europe, the last desperate gaiety of the beau monde in 1937 Paris, and guerrilla operations with the French underground in 1944. Night Soldiers is a scrupulously researched panoramic novel, a work on a grand scale.

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