Night Soldiers: A Novel | Alan Furst

Night Soldiers: A Novel | Alan Furst | Integrity in a world gone mad

books:

Night Soldiers: A ...

	Night Soldiers: A Novel Alan Furst Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2002 - 462 pages average customer review:based on 58 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

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.

for more information click here

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.

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.

for more information click here

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.

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.

for more information click here

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.

for more information click here