Rating: 
Summary: Magnificent
Review: "Night Soldiers" grabs you on the first page and just doesn't let go. The characters are multi-dimensional, flesh-and-blood humans who stay with you long after you turn the last page. Furst's plot keeps you on the edge of your seat, heart pounding, but he never lets you forget that this war was like all wars in important ways - it was full of sorrow and grief; chaos, absurdity, and random tiny moments of kindness. This is a thriller for adults who love great literature.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Story
Review: After having read the first of these, we ordered all of them, and have been reading them over the past two weeks. Finds the flavor of central and eastern europe prior to and during WWII like nothing else we have ever read. This one I particularly like after being in Bulgaria last year for three weeks. The characters are welll drawn, the mood of Europe which is about to be destroyed is wonderful. Order them all, then read them all, and then reread them. Looking forward to the next one to be published in August of this year.
Rating:
Summary: Story of Intrigue and War
Review: Alan Furst explores pre and war time Europe though the eyes of Khristo Stoianev in his book Night Soldier. Khristo is a Bulgarian youth who watches helplessly as his younger brother is kicked to death by Nazis. Feeling powerless he hooks up with revolutionaries. Soon he must flee from Bulgaria and journeys to the Soviet Union to train as a spy. Night Soldier's is a chronicle of his life through a turbulent time as Khristo journeys through Europe.Furst tells this story of intrigue and war with great skill. The story begins with the brutal death of Khristo's brother and continues from one war torn setting to another. It appears that there was no place of peace and hope for the people of this time and place. Furst clearly defines the brutality of the period and the difficult moral choices which the people of Europe were faced with. He has peopled the story with intriguing characters who react with courage, strength, cunning, avarice and fear. Many like Khristo are trying their best to see their way through these years to survive. Khristo is an ever interesting character. First driven to do what is right he is given a taste of the difficult choices in the life of a spy, when a lover betrays him and his superiors request that he take care of her. He soon finds the Russian tentacles under Stalin to be as evil as the Nazi's who he is fighting. He would like to elude them both and tries to, but in a warring Europe it is no easy task. For those interested in stories set in WWII or tales of intrigue this book is recommended.
Rating:
Summary: The Anti-Le Carre
Review: Alan Furst is the anti-LeCarre. John LeCarre is still mired in the 1960s nihilism which holds that Communism, Fascism and Democracy are all moral equivalents, so that it doesn't matter who runs the world. That's all well and good as long as you have an English Channel between you and the sonderkommando and you have no moral compass. Alan Furst takes the exact opposite view, that there are things worth fighting for and that consent of the governed is preferable to genocide and torture. Furst writes better than LeCarre, too.
In some ways, Night Soldiers is my favorite Furst novel. One follows the course of his protagonist's life for eleven years, so the reader gets to know the character and watch his development. As Khristo, the hero, goes from Bulgaria to Moscow to Spain to Paris to Prague and then down the Danube, his attraction to, and later, his disenchantment with, Communism are clearly understandable.
Furst also tells the story from the viewpoint of a number of other characters, which is an interesting effect. Best of all, it is the longest of the Furst novels, which allows the reader to stretch out the pleasure of one of these great works of literature.
Rating: 
Summary: The Dirty Game
Review: Alan Furst's Night Soldiers gives us another take on WWII, from the lesser-known terrain of Eastern Europe with fascism on the ascendancy to the counterpoint of the villainy of Stalin's NKVD spies compromising, double-dealing, hoodwinking, betraying and just generally mucking-up everyone and everything they touch. The narrative moves from Bulgaria to Moscow to Spain during the Civil War and France after the fall to the Nazis. A young Bulgarian is recruited, exploited and indoctrinated as an NKVD spy in Stalin's USSR. Uneducated, but with a talent for the dirty game, he is sent to Spain during the Civil War to undermine and manipulate the leftist romantics, the naive and trusting "true believers" fighting for the Republic against Franco's fascists, using them to serve Moscow's purposes. Disillusioned and about to be caught up in one of Stalin's many purges, he escapes to France where further adventures await him. Alan Furst's research is meticulous. His sense of place and time and atmosphere is superb. He has staked out this more obscure arena as his personal obsession, and I found his evocation of Eastern Europe and the Russia of the 1930's most interesting, not to mention his delineation of the machinations of our great ally "Uncle Joe" and the perfidious activities of his NKVD, so much of which has been revealed or substantiated since the end of the Cold War. Stalin's regime was a nasty bunch, and it is nice to see someone explore and examine how much dirty work was going on under the surface of then understood history. This is the first of Mr. Furst's novels I have read. I will read more. He has a nice style, and he knows his subject matter, and revisiting this era in his time machine, and getting a new slant on the terrain, is well worth the trip.
Rating: 
Summary: Not as good as Night Soldiers.
Review: Alan Furst's turf is "Mittel Europa" and he clearly knows a lot about the politics and cultures of the region. His "Night Soldiers," placed believable characters in absorbing
settings and circumstances. The same grasp of the Balkan and Russian backgrounds
is evident here, but the characters are not as interesting, many who could be interesting are left hanging here and there, and there basically is no plot, just a central character
who is not particularly convincing and suffering through a long string of events, mainly of the narrow escape variety. Too bad.
Rating: 
Summary: good, but too long.
Review: Another good espionnage book by Furst. The only real flaw with the book is its length. If you are anything like me, you'll get the feeling that Furst is trying to make a long novel for the sake of it being long. The last hundred pages or so are kind of useless and the book ends up being a chore to read through. Otherwise, the book is really nice and once again Mr. Furst creates a nive gallery of believable characters and events. The atmosphere is just great. Had the book had been shorter, it would rate a solid 4 stars, maybe even 5. His shorter books (like the Polish Officer or Blood of Victory)are better.
Rating:
Summary: captivating
Review: Enthralling and gripping, but not in the usual terms of the genre. Furst really knows how to write. The detail, the tone, the characters, - they all come together with a marvelous complexity. This is a page-turner but not a quick read; one really wants to savor it. Life on the edge in the world of pre-war Soviet intelligence is particularly well drawn. The ending lacks drama, but the loose ends are all adequately accounted for. This is my first Furst; looking forward to more.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Espionage thrillers {the well written ones,anyway} are always compared to John le Carre. These books are different, more of a crooss between Graham Greenes morally ambiguous thrillers and Charles Mccarry's wonderful Paul Christopher series, and are quite brilliant. In NIGHT SOLDIERS ALAN FURST takes up the sweep of WWII in europe through the eyes of a Bulgarian named Khristo Stoianev.{Night soldiers are spies.} After watching Fascist militia stomp his brother to death, Stoianev embarks on a journet through Russia,barcelona and Madrid in republican Spain, Vichy France, and eventually,back home. The narrative is filed with fascinating historical oddities{the Sovites in Spain robbing 64 million pounds in gold from Spain, then decaring two days later to have discovered massive reserves in the Urals} the labrynith of the NKVD duplicity{the way they set traps is brilliantly presented}.Mr. Furst has obviously done massive research on the history of this era, and it shows. the Spanish civil war in all its crazed glory is etched perfectly, as again the Soviets play games with their own. This is an excellent book,written from the perspective of one of the lesser known countires involved{bulgaria}. Morally unsure if not ambiguous,this is front rank writing, Period.Highy recommended
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book 1 of Furst's WW2 Espionage Output
Review: First of all, no writer can approach Furst's ability to convey the oppressive atmosphere of Europe in the years leading up to WWII and the war years. What LeCarré did for the Cold War, Furst does for the fifteen years preceding it. Here, in the first of his six novels so far on the covert intelligence wars of the era, he establishes his style and tone. The book starts in a small fishing village in Bulgaria in the early 1930s, where a teenager in forced to watch a fascist militia beat his brother to death. Furst carefully shows how a Soviet agent eventually comes to his town and recruits him to the NKVD, starting him down a long journey into the darkness of espionage. The book then proceeds in a somewhat fractured episodic manner, as the Bulgarian Khristo grows up as a night soldier (spy), struggling to stay alive and return to a normal life, in his own personal (to borrow the phrase from Celiné) journey to the end of night. The book takes Khristo from terrifying training in Moscow, to the sad lost cause of the Spanish Civil War (where he sees first hand how Germany used the alliance with Franco as a proving ground for new weapons and tactics), to occupied France, and eventually back through the Balkans. Khristo is a sympathetic character, but like many of Furst's leading men-indeed, this may be a feature of all spies and not Furst's fault-he is a little too enigmatic and withdrawn to fully capture the reader's heart. At the core of the book is a small cadre of friends from his training days, who, despite shifting allegiances and loyalties over the fifteen years or so, try as much as possible to help each other survive. Unfortunately, one of the weaknesses of the book, in it's episodic construction, is that in covering such a large swath of time and locations, it's hard to keep track of who in who (especially once you introduce cover identities and aliases), who they are working for (agencies and factions proliferate), and under what motivation. Despite these difficulties, the book is certainly worth reading for its amazing level of detail and tension in set piece sequences, as well as it's ability to convey a sense of Europe gone mad-trapped between the equal horrors of fascism and Stalinist communism.
|
