Word: furst
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DARK STAR by Alan Furst (Houghton Mifflin; $22.95). Plot is less important in this impressive spy novel than description, the re-creation of the nightmarish tensions that erupted during the 1930s between Soviet NKVD agents and Stalin's Georgian thugs...
...Alan Furst...
...dead Soviet agent in a waterfront brothel in Ostend, lonely footsteps muffled by the snow on a dark Berlin street, a worn leather satchel with a false bottom left in a Prague railway station. No, they do not make movies like that anymore. But in Dark Star, Alan Furst has replicated this idealized form, this image of Europe entwined in a web of malevolent ideology...
...Furst's perfect-pitch re-creation begins with a fatally flawed protagonist: Andre Szara, 40, Pravda reporter in Europe and occasional Soviet spy, whose life goals have been reduced to a desire to outlast Stalin's purges. As the novel opens in 1937, Szara, a Russified Polish Jew, is caught in the midst of a blood feud in the Soviet secret services between his NKVD friends, mostly Jewish intellectuals, and Stalin's Georgian thugs. The fear that dominates Szara's nomadic life is palpable: a typically chilling passage is about his return to Russia aboard a Soviet freighter with...
...Paris charged with maintaining ties to an imperiled Jewish industrialist in Berlin, who somehow knows how many bombers Germany is building each month. Fear not; Dark Star never becomes one of those breathless adventures that build fake suspense around schemes to stop Hitler. Plot is less important than Furst's powerful descriptive writing, particularly his account of Szara's nightmare flight across Poland in the first days of the war. What carries the book to a level beyond the cynicism of spy novels is its ability to carry us back in time. Nothing can be like watching Casablanca...