Run a Hollow Road

Rating:
Summary: Recapturing the Europe of the Cold War
Review: "Run a Hollow Road" tells a tightly-plotted tale of love, disillusionment and self-betrayal set in Europe from 1959 to1969. There are four principal characters-Joan, a young Canadian from a background of privilege; Terry, a New Yorker of Irish working-class origins; Stefan Bor and Grizelda Turque, two former war refugees. Each of them is on a personal quest. There seems to be an idealist and an opportunist in them all. This is at one and the same time a romance, a précis of Cold War politics and a psychological study of four people in flight (the first two from conformity, the second pair from memories of the past).

The protagonists all find assignments that bring them to Vienna. Here Dolores Pala's lively prose excels in recreating the weather,the architecture, and the moods of the inhabitants of this Cold War crossroads, where the drama will finally play out. She also deftly sketches in the atmosphere behind the Iron Curtain, and convincingly conjures up Paris and Rome, as seen by young expatriates in the Fifties.

The author's personal knowledge of this historic background, in addition to her gift for words, makes it real. Added to that are her imaginative powers in creating pungent dialogue and characters who go on living in our own imagination after the last page is turned. How will they work things out in the decades that follow the end of the story?

Rating:
Summary: Read a Good Book
Review: "Run a Hollow Road," by Dolores Palà. (iUniverse, 182 pp. $13.95.)

John Joseph Fitzpatrick, father of the male lead in Dolores Palà's third novel, spent his entire adult life driving a crosstown bus "along a hollow road" on New York's 86th Street, dreaming of owning a patch of farmland somewhere up along the Hudson.
His son, Terry, determined not to follow his dad down that unhappy path, winds up in-stead with Joan Ross, a naïve young woman from Nova Scotia with her own dreams, and a group of other equally diverse expatriates in postwar Vienna. They are all lost souls vigorously running, without recognizing it, their own hollow roads to the destruction of their dreams.
It's a powerful novel. Palà writes well.
It's also a sad novel, despite the surface joy that accompanies most of the characters as they chase freedom from the binding restraints of childhood faith and the adult need to make a living. And it may be a universal novel, touching a reader as he identifies with Confucius' ob-servation that we live not as we would, but as we can.
Palà is passionate about her characters, with all their faults, and paints them meticulously well. Although neither drawing nor poetry, the book evokes haunting memories of William Steig's "The Lonely Ones" or something out of T.S. Eliot. Palà watches with love, like God, crying silently "no, no, no," as her creatures choose their paths to disaster. It's hard not to get caught up in these people's lives.
She also paints a loving picture of the mid-cold-war Vienna of the 1950s, with all its beauty and ambivalence.
Despite the stage setting - Vienna, Paris, Rome, New York - the book remains centered on its people and their struggles. After the final turmoil their world ends, like Eliot's, "not with a bang but a whimper." Well, almost. In the final paragraph, as Terry and Joan head out into the night, there is the hint that dawn may not be far off. All is not lost.
There is, of course, some of the obligatory vulgarity that comes with modern novels. It had shock value when Henry Miller first drew attention to himself with it, but now comes across as merely distasteful, not daring. Unfortunately, Palà's publisher apparently couldn't afford a proofreader and the book is riddled with typos.
More's the pity, because they detract and distract from what is otherwise a splendid novel.
-o-
Retired journalist John Donahue lives in Northfield. At one time in a long career he re-viewed books for The Washington Post.
-30-

Rating:
Summary: Recapturing the Europe of the Cold War
Review: "Run a Hollow Road" tells a tightly-plotted tale of love, disillusionment and self-betrayal set in Europe from 1959 to1969. There are four principal characters-Joan, a young Canadian from a background of privilege; Terry, a New Yorker of Irish working-class origins; Stefan Bor and Grizelda Turque, two former war refugees. Each of them is on a personal quest. There seems to be an idealist and an opportunist in them all. This is at one and the same time a romance, a précis of Cold War politics and a psychological study of four people in flight (the first two from conformity, the second pair from memories of the past).

The protagonists all find assignments that bring them to Vienna. Here Dolores Pala's lively prose excels in recreating the weather,the architecture, and the moods of the inhabitants of this Cold War crossroads, where the drama will finally play out. She also deftly sketches in the atmosphere behind the Iron Curtain, and convincingly conjures up Paris and Rome, as seen by young expatriates in the Fifties.

The author's personal knowledge of this historic background, in addition to her gift for words, makes it real. Added to that are her imaginative powers in creating pungent dialogue and characters who go on living in our own imagination after the last page is turned. How will they work things out in the decades that follow the end of the story?

Rating:
Summary: A hidden Treasure
Review: I loved this book and cannot understand why I couldn't find it anywhere but on the web. This is a novel that should be up front on bookstore counters all over the country and in Canada. Especially in Canada. Not many Nova Scotian heroines in modern fiction these days. Pala should be celebrated for creating this one.

Joan Ross meets a farouche, overweight, captivating New Yorker on her first visit to New York in the late 50s. Her name is Grizzy and she mesmerizes the self concsious, unsure though well educated and pretty young Maritimer on the spot. Grizzy makes a lasting impression. Several years later Joan Ross meets her again, this time in Vienna. She also meets the young man who is going to change her life. Grizzy as a symbol is gone and Grizzy as a catalyst takes over.
This haqppens in Vienna during the cold war. The oold war becomes a character in the novel. It is everywhere in the prevailing attitudes. But it is most of all in the timidity that seems to cloud the characters' judgements.

Pala gets the tone of each of her characters. There is a counterpoint in their goings on. Their stories relate to each other intimately, yet they are all flawed. What I think the author is saying so richly, but perhaps not always that clearly, is that people live as reflections of their times. They are images of their periods. If Grizzy had been young in the 90s she wouldn't have been the same Grizzy she was then, having been born in the 1930's.

Dolores Pala has written two other novels that were published more conventionally, has given us here a thoughtful, often very funny, portrait of a period, endearing characters very much alive in a fascinating place and time which might be called The Not So Good Old Days. I recommend it highly.

Rating:
Summary: Run to read new Pala novel
Review: John Donohue is on target about the symbolism in Pala's newest novel. I was too engrossed in it, however, to bother with the typos.

It takes a while to get into but once you are there in Vienna of l959 and have met all the characters you never want to leave.

My only real criticism of this beautifully written book is that in ends too soon, and doesn't go into cold war intrigues more.

A great read.

Rating:
Summary: In not so old Vienna
Review: olores Pala's third novel,"Run a Hollow Road," is an instant evocation of the Vienna of those happy and heady days that followed the signing of the Austrian State Treaty by the four occupying powers, the US, the USSR. Great Britain and France, and which constituted the first notable move toward detente after the death in 1953 of Joseph Stalin. However the novel's characters in many ways resemble more the inhabitants of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin of two decades earlier, even to the point of reviving at least the ghost of Sally Bowles, and dividing the novel's continuity into neat episodes.
Traveling the "Hollow Road" are typical East European exiles, fly-by-night journalists, reporters from dubious radio stations, smugglers and others whose lives and careers are determined by the closed but now cracking Iron Curtain. All are bathed in the aroma of Viennese coffee, cakes, and fresh "heurige" Grinzing wine. The central character, Griselda Turque, embodies a great deal of Viennese ineffability and illusion. An American of uncertain origin, profession, or future prospects, she deals artfully with life's adventures, until they suddenly overwhelm her. The other more or less conventional characters of the novel provide a foil for Grizzy's idiosyncracies and unpredictabilities. Nevertheless, she remains the kind of individual we would all like to know--especially in Vienna, and especially in the 50's and 60's.
Ms. Pala is very familiar with the venues and inhabitants of her novel. She has a lightness of touch and a strength of expression which make reading it a very pleasant experience.

Rating:
Summary: In not so old Vienna
Review: olores Pala's third novel,"Run a Hollow Road," is an instant evocation of the Vienna of those happy and heady days that followed the signing of the Austrian State Treaty by the four occupying powers, the US, the USSR. Great Britain and France, and which constituted the first notable move toward detente after the death in 1953 of Joseph Stalin. However the novel's characters in many ways resemble more the inhabitants of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin of two decades earlier, even to the point of reviving at least the ghost of Sally Bowles, and dividing the novel's continuity into neat episodes.
Traveling the "Hollow Road" are typical East European exiles, fly-by-night journalists, reporters from dubious radio stations, smugglers and others whose lives and careers are determined by the closed but now cracking Iron Curtain. All are bathed in the aroma of Viennese coffee, cakes, and fresh "heurige" Grinzing wine. The central character, Griselda Turque, embodies a great deal of Viennese ineffability and illusion. An American of uncertain origin, profession, or future prospects, she deals artfully with life's adventures, until they suddenly overwhelm her. The other more or less conventional characters of the novel provide a foil for Grizzy's idiosyncracies and unpredictabilities. Nevertheless, she remains the kind of individual we would all like to know--especially in Vienna, and especially in the 50's and 60's.
Ms. Pala is very familiar with the venues and inhabitants of her novel. She has a lightness of touch and a strength of expression which make reading it a very pleasant experience.

Rating:
Summary: A Book Not To Be Missed
Review: When you finish reading Run A Hollow Road you realize why Dolores Pala's first novel, In Search of Mihailo, is on the list of the Twenty Books One Must Read. She writes with such tenderness and passion.
Run A Hollow Road opens as Joan Ross, the sheltered young woman from Nova Scotia, reads in a newspaper that her old friend Grizzy has been imprisoned in Berlin. From then on past and present weave in and out, unobtrusively, as the story unfolds and one comes to understand the characters, Joan, Terry, the young journalist with whom she falls in love, Grizzy, running from her past until she can run no more.The reader becomes engrossed in their destinies as they meet and affect each others lives in cities so vividly described, New York, Paris and especially Vienna in the 1950's. The second world war is over, the Cold War has begun.The story and the characters evolve with such intensity, passion and tension that the reader cannot put the book down. As with Dolores Pala's other novels, I was reluctant to come to the end and to leave these people that I had come to care about so very much.There is no neatly tied up ending, but rather an end which allows the reader's imagination to take over and stay with Joan, Terry and Grizzy. Will Joan and Terry be able to renew their love, will Grizzy be able to live without running from herself and her past? As Rachelle Horowitz writes in her review "this book ends too soon".
Reading this novel is such an enormous pleasure. Anyone who has not read it or has not read Dolores Pala's first two novels does not know the great reading experience they are missing.