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Title: A Death in Vienna by Daniel Silva ISBN: 0-399-15143-5 Publisher: Putnam Pub Group Pub. Date: 23 February, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.36 (28 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: On the trail of a Nazi war criminal.
Comment: "A Death in Vienna" is Daniel Silva's third novel about how the horrors of the Holocaust reach into the present. Gabriel Allon is a former Israeli spy who now works as an art restoration expert in Venice. His old boss from the Israeli Intelligence Service, Ari Shamron, appears one day with devastating news about an explosion in Vienna. Gabriel is not anxious to go back to the city where his wife and son had been victims of a car bomb in 1991. However, Shamron persuades him to return to this "forbidden city" to investigate the bombing of the Wartime Claims and Inquiries Office, which left two young women dead and an old friend, Eli Lavon, in a coma.
Gabriel soon learns that a man named Max Klein had set the events in motion that may have led to the bombing. Klein had once been a violinist in the Auschwitz camp orchestra and he had a particularly vivid memory of a Nazi named Erich Radek. In front of Klein, Radek once killed fifteen concentration camp prisoners in cold blood when they could not correctly identify a musical piece by Brahms. Many years later, Klein spots this same war criminal placidly having coffee in a Viennese café, and he reports what he has seen to Eli Lavon, who then begins to make the inquiries that almost cost him his life. Gabriel's investigation leads him to make some horrifying discoveries, the most painful one being the heart-rending story of his mother's two years of hell as an inmate of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Silva writes with great feeling about the harrowing events of the Holocaust and the culpability of those who helped the Nazis escape punishment after the war ended. In addition, Silva convincingly makes the point that radical right-wing political parties still pose a serious threat around the world, and that we must do everything in our power to protect our civil liberties in the face of these extremists. "A Death in Vienna" is fast-paced, compelling, and filled with intriguing twists and turns. It is a worthy, well-researched, and thought-provoking conclusion to Silva's excellent trilogy.
Rating: 5
Summary: Another page turner, and a ggod one
Comment: Up front, I admit that I like the books of Daniel Silva. They are interesting, well written and very well plotted. Many of the characters are original and well formed as well. While this book replows the old ground of the Holocaust one more time, chasing after an eighty year old mass murderer this time, it does it well. Art restorer and sometime assassin Gabriel Allon is once more forced into the dark business of espionage and confronts both his own and his Mother's nemesis in this tale.
Like the other books by Mr. Silva this one strains credulity from time to time, but good writing in this genre often needs a suspension of disbelief, sometimes a substantial one. That Mr. Silva's book, A Death In Vienna, requires more than one was neither important nor off putting for me. It is just a fact. The plot other than this is tightly constructed, and you do get caught up in its twists and turns.
While I was reading this book I also read a very provocative review of the new Mel Gibson movie, the Passion of Christ, and several of the points the author of that review made could also be said with profit about this book. As a non-Christian that reviewer had difficulty getting past the extreme violence of the Passion of Christ and embracing it as a story of love and redemption. Simply stated the gore of the Passion got in the way of the message and he did not have the cultural heritage to see it as anything other than gore. The Lamb of God is horrifically killed and the Resurrection did not compensate for that fact for him, nor did it make it any easier to digest what he had seen.
Similarly, the massive, institutionalized and individual cruelty of the Holocaust is something that cannot be sipped a little at a time. It is a deluge of bestiality of man to man that is hard to swallow the first time you read about it, and it does not get any easier to take with repetition. If anything each telling becomes more and more unnerving as real people, people just like your and my neighbor do things to people that are as disgusting as they are true. There is no answer here of how a civilized people could have done such a thing. I do not think that there ever will be such an answer. But I think that the story resonates differently if you are a Jew. The telling of the story of the Holocaust has become, not an act of contrition, but an act of solemn witness. It is not redemption that is desired, but simple recognition of the horror that lies within civilized man, a remembrance of the people that endured that horror, and a warning to everyone - Since we do not understand the Holocaust we cannot ever be certain that we can prevent it from coming again.
In this book at least, a civilized man can confront and fight evil without descending into that evil himself. Even though Gabriel Allon is, and probably will be again an assassin, a killer of men. He is not a murderer. That is a vital difference between Allon and the Nazi in the book. It is not the act that makes the man, it is the choice and the reason for that choice that either gives or withholds meaning for the act. Thus, though there is a profound difference between hunting down and killing the murderers of the Israeli Olympic athletes and the trial of Adolph Eichman, both are moral acts for reasons explained in the fiction of this book. On the other hand, there is no explanation possible for the Holocaust, no explanation for the original participation in it nor for the current climate of denial of it. Silva does a service to us all, by standing witness.
A small point perhaps, a cartridge is a bullet and a propellant in a single package that can be loaded into a gun and fired. Silva uses this word once when he means a magazine that holds multiple cartridges. It is a small point, but one an expert assassin should know.
Read the book, you will like it and it will make you think.
Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent ending to a 3 book series
Comment: I had just finished reading the last/newest book from my favorite author Patricia Cornwell and needed something new. On her website she recommended this book. When I looked into it further I decided to read the first two in the series as well. In 2 weeks I read all 3 books, and I have 4 children and a full time job. All three books just can't be put down!! The characters are so well written that you forget the books are fiction (even though some of the book is based on reality). I could picture the whole scene in my mind. I would highly recommend all 3 of these novels. Daniel Silva is a first rate author in my book!
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Title: The Confessor by Daniel Silva ISBN: 0399149724 Publisher: Putnam Pub Group Pub. Date: 24 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: Avenger by Frederick Forsyth ISBN: 0312319517 Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books Pub. Date: 30 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: Split Second by David Baldacci ISBN: 0446530891 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: 30 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: The Last Juror by John Grisham ISBN: 0385510438 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 03 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: The English Assassin by Daniel Silva ISBN: 0451208188 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: 25 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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