Word: furste
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This sense of outrage lurks in the shadows of his texts. In Kingdom, Hungarian emigre Nicholas Morath is drawn ever deeper into clandestine missions he doesn't understand to stop his country's drift into collaboration with the Nazis. Though Furst sees himself as a political novelist, he has chosen a storyteller's genre, and his books do not stand on a soapbox. His tales have got leaner as he keeps refining them down, explaining less, saying more in fewer words. While there is a moment in every book when some character cuts to the bone to pinpoint the evil...
What gleams on the surface in Furst's books is his vivid, precise evocation of mood, time, place, a letter-perfect re-creation of the quotidian details of World War II Europe that wraps around us like the rich fug of a wartime railway station. He puts us on the exact street where the Daisy Bar sat in Montmartre, gives us the heavy smell of an eau de toilette called Zouave. His stories rumble along in the dreary trains that seemed to be forever crisscrossing Europe...
...eludes me how I'm able to make things come alive," Furst says, then launches into an excited tour of the "astonishingly eccentric" range of research, random and planned, that brings such authenticity to his crepuscular world: the vanity bio of a 1920s Lithuanian, the essays of French photographer Brassai, old Paris Baedekers, and so on. He constantly makes notes of telling details: the cabaret performer with a red light bulb at his crotch that Furst once spotted in a book by Cyrus Sulzberger turns up in Kingdom...
...creating such a distant atmosphere is an uncanny skill for a man who grew up on Manhattan's intellectual Upper West Side. The son of a hat manufacturer, whose maternal grandmother fled from revolutionary Russia, Furst found his literary inspiration in France. He became a "pathological Francophile" the day in 1965 when he lay on his back after a picnic in the town square of Grignan and "felt the blood in the earth" of Provence. Paris, where he lived for eight years before moving to Sag Harbor, N.Y., in 1993, remains for him the center of Western civilization, the "consolation...
...edgy plots unwind through the murky terrors of enforced espionage, Furst's heroes are always deeply human, if not particularly heroic. They are not professional spies but bystanders drafted by events, often Eastern Europeans from the downtrodden states of the continent's core. They live in a fog of moral ambiguity, caught in the shifting alliances and "gray positions" of current events, until unexpected circumstances force them to make choices without understanding the consequences of their acts. These enigmatic men--and the reader--almost never find out what really happened. Not everything is revealed; the story trails off, just...