There’s a scattershot quality to this Balkan imbroglio that leaves it a few notches below Furst’s best work.
As the Nazi invasion threat looms in Greece, a detective undertakes various secret missions in this latest from the master of European spy fiction.
Furst’s 11th novel (The Spies of Warsaw, 2008, etc.) covers the six months between October 1940 and April 1941, when German troops occupied Athens, and is set mostly in the port city of Salonika, an embarkation point for neutral Turkey. Though Greece is ruled by the dictator Metaxas, the Salonika cops have a live-and-let live attitude, personified by their deputy commander, Costa Zannis, Furst’s protagonist. The tough but likable Zannis is a Mr. Fix-It with a wide-ranging portfolio. The city is on edge with rumors about German intentions; in an early sequence, Zannis runs a German spy to ground in a warehouse. A bachelor and a ladies man, Zannis’s current girlfriend is Roxanne, an English ballet teacher, but naturally he’s happy to oblige the “stunning” Emilia Krebs, the Jewish wife of a Wehrmacht officer, who’s trying to arrange an escape route for other German Jews. After Mussolini, without Hitler’s approval, invades Greece but stumbles, her project advances; Zannis, in the mountains, recruits the anti-Nazi Pavlic, his opposite number in Zagreb. His subsequent trip to Budapest secures another part of Emilia’s pipeline. In Salonika, Zannis has a new love interest, exchanging Roxanne (a self-revealed British spy) for Demetria, gorgeous wife of a superrich banker. His attempts to free her from her gilded cage are interrupted by two more missions, these at the behest of the Brits. (Who can refuse Greece’s oldest ally?) The first takes him to Paris, to spirit away a top British asset, and the second to Yugoslavia, to assist an anti-German coup d’etat, but these episodes have no cumulative effect, and Zannis’s role as a stand-tall hero is undercut twice; in France it’s an unidentified deus ex machina who saves the day, while in Yugoslavia he’s a bit player.
There’s a scattershot quality to this Balkan imbroglio that leaves it a few notches below Furst’s best work.Pub Date: June 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6603-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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