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Title: Blood of Victory : A Novel by Alan Furst ISBN: 0-8129-6872-7 Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks Pub. Date: 13 May, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.62 (16 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: An Intellectual's Adventure
Comment: Alan Furst is a good argument for simply drifting through bookstores. I had never read him before but found his writing so interesting that I am now looking for his other six novels.
In "Blood of Victory," Furst creates an émigré writer who has fled Stalin's Russia and is living in a Nazis occupied Paris. He is safe but oppressed. It is 1940 and the German-Soviet Pact is still working. Occupied Paris is not a happy place.
We first encounter I.A. Serebin boarding a boat from Romania to Turkey and find one of the interesting realities in modern civilization; travel is essential. For countries to operate people must travel and so even in a dictatorship, passage is possible if the right papers can be acquired. Ultimately, Serebin is convinced to help the British attempt to block the Danube, preventing German access to the Romanian oil that is key to their remaining both militarily and industrially functional.
Seeing the world from Istanbul, Bucharest, Paris and Belgrade shortly before the 1941 German attack is a new twist on the Second World War in the tradition of Eric Ambler and other spy chroniclers.
This is an intellectual's book (I hope I have not hurt its sales with that phrase) that carries you into a world of smart, reflective people living lives as refugees, intellectuals and activists trying to accomplish something. It is your experience of their personalities and their interactions in interesting and exotic settings, not the James Bond style heroics, which carry the book.
It is worth reading for the portrait of the fight between the Iron Shirt fascist movement and the Romanian dictatorship and, in a very Ambler-like tradition, it has vivid believable scenes of street fighting and random civilian casualties that feel all too real.
"Blood of Victory" has proven Furst is worth getting to know and I have already found two more of his works for the near future
Rating: 5
Summary: War May Be Interested in You
Comment: This is one of those novels that stays with you for weeks after you've finished it. Like any novel by John LeCarre, you have to work at an Alan Furst novel. It doesn't necessarily come easy.
With the poetry of James Burke at his fingertips, and the haunting portrait of Europe under fire, the truthfully global loss of innocence, Furst begins with a tale that is fascinating for rich, human characters, then for the geography, and finally for the plot. It reminded me of those grainy photographs taken in European train stations in the mid 1930's when people literally ran for their lives.
Ilya Serebin is not interested in war, but as Trotsky wrote, "war might be interested in [him.]" And it is.
On escape from beseiged Russia and communism, torn between a safehouse in Paris and his conscience, reluctant to leave a dying lover and a new one playing the deadly game he has been ante-upped for, Serebin is recruited by the OSS to asssist in a "cockleshell heroes" attempt to block the oil route ('oil, the blood of victory' from which the title is taken] from Romania to Nazi Germany.
It is a classic WWII novel of love, betrayal, confusion and sadness. Despair. Melancholy. I can't recommend Alan Furst enough. He may not be your cup of tea or shot of vodka because of the subject matter, but his writing is brilliant. You get a feel of "real" to the story.
Rating: 3
Summary: Entertaining formula
Comment: To be honest, it seems as if when you have read one Alan Furst novel you have read 'em all -at least as far as period & character development. That being said, I enjoy Furst's novel and look forward to each new variation-on-a-theme that he puts out. Basically this book is another "nouvelle-noire" novel if there is such a thing, populated by characters that Bogart would be type-cast playing if we still had Bogart to play them. The period is the early stages of the Second World War, the characters are all a bit jaded-but-on-the-right-side. If you have seen Casablanca as often as I have, you will feel right at home with the mood. In this particular outing Furst's Ur-heroe is supposedly trying to block the transport of Roumanian Oil (the title subject) to Nazi Germany, but the plot kinda wanders around & by the end one doesn't really care all that much about whether he succeeds or not -I guess that is the best part of a Furst novel, one can simply wallow in period & let the action swirl around one. Overall a pleasant diversion for a rainy afternoon.
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Title: Dark Star : A Novel by Alan Furst ISBN: 0375759999 Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks Pub. Date: 09 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Polish Officer : A Novel by Alan Furst ISBN: 0375758275 Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks Pub. Date: 09 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Red Gold : A Novel by Alan Furst ISBN: 0375758593 Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks Pub. Date: 08 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Kingdom of Shadows by Alan Furst ISBN: 0375758267 Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks Pub. Date: 09 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: The World at Night : A Novel by Alan Furst ISBN: 0375758585 Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks Pub. Date: 08 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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