Word: vienna
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Reported by Edward Barnes/Pale, Massimo Calabresi/ Vienna, Marguerite Michaels/Washington, William Rademaekers/London, Thomas Sancton/Paris and Alexandra Stiglmayer/Sarajevo
...counterintelligence staff. There was hardly an important, or even an unimportant, case involving the KGB or the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) that she did not know. Jeanne Vertefeuille could follow the tangled threads that might link a case in Kuala Lumpur 10 years ago to one in Vienna today. If a KGB colonel had appeared in Copenhagen under one name and turned up a decade later in New Delhi with another identity, give it to Jeanne-she would sort...
...debut novel, Private Altars (Random House; 322 pages; $21), Katherine Mosby audaciously bucks such fashionable themes, and the result is a stunningly lyrical work of fiction. Set in the South during the 1920s and '30s, the novel revolves around the suffering of Vienna Daniels-a woman, Mosby writes, whose "face had the stamp of character intelligence sometimes bestows, and the look of ruined beauty...
Fluent in Latin and Greek, Vienna is a Northerner who lands in the small town of Winsville to marry a man who will never appreciate her intensity or intellect. Like some fiercely independent Victorian heroines, Vienna is doomed to the life of a pariah by the narrow-mindedness of others. She is betrayed and abandoned by friends and lovers; her children remain outcasts by association; she is destroyed by the death of those dearest to her. Vienna is, above all, a woman for whom brilliance and sensuality provide a painfully meager shield against the truculence of fate...
...Private Altars is about more than the strife Vienna is forced to endure; it is about language. In sentence after lush sentence, Mosby is intent on showing the reader that she was primarily a poet before trying fiction. Turn to nearly any page and find an image like this, which describes Vienna's distaste for mundane tea-table conversation: "It was as remote from her interests as the hieroglyphs spewed from the endless coiling tongue of a ticker-tape machine." The trouble is that the accretion of similes sometimes slows the story to a maddening pace. Nevertheless, Mosby's debut...