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Read Night Soldiers (2002)

Night Soldiers (2002)

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Rating
4 of 5 Votes: 5
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ISBN
0375760008 (ISBN13: 9780375760006)
Language
English
Publisher
random house trade paperbacks

Night Soldiers (2002) - Plot & Excerpts

[Cross-posted here, with pictures.]It had become entirely Vidin business, Bulgarian business, Balkan business.(p. 15)The above references a savage beating, but even as Night Soldiers jumps from Bulgaria, to Russia, to Spain, to France, to other parts of France, to winding down the Danube toward an American epilogue, the story always retains some sense of its Balkan origin. It's in how our protagonist views and interacts with the world around him, and it means that the American reader sees a whole other side of WWII, and the decade leading up to it.That said, I think the book falters a bit in its second half. Reading the first half, we see the strange ways that fascism and communism both reach Vidin, a small Bulgarian town, in the mid 1930s. The actual ideologies aren't really present, of course, it's just new language for new outside forces that encroach, as everyone has, forever, on these poor people who live by the Danube. Then we see how the NKVD (predecessor to the KGB) trains its spies, the strange ways one rises in the ranks, and how they intervene in the affairs of other countries. This section of the book is often thrilling, suspenseful, and satisfying, but it feels... off. In a good way.The small-town fascists are pathetic and laughable even as they commit terrible acts of violence, the NKVD's training program has this awkward whiff of dorm-life, and getting into the upper echelons means going to parties that turn into drunk guys running around a bath shooting at religious iconography. Where normal spy stories give you exciting and frighteningly competent agents executing perfect, and complicated, double deals, Night Soldiers shows plausible human beings who go the simplest route that they can. It feels more like learning about real spies.Well, except that the book is written in a wonderful omniscent voice that so inhabits each location it begins to feel like first-person-plural. The authorial voice, never shy about taking a moment to up us on some history or jump into the mind of whoever's present, is really one of the best parts of Night Soldiers. It makes these leaps effortlessly, closing in and drawing out less like the godly narrator of a 19th century novel (a type of narrator I love) and more like you're having an intense, but free-form, conversation with a few hundred people at once, who never talk over each other. It gives each place and time a voice, along with each character.It inhabits Paris just as well as anywhere else, but when we get there... well, the book doesn't exactly go downhill. From there to the end, coincidences begin to pile up and deaths turn out to have been greatly exaggerated. It feels a bit more like a spy movie. Now, none of this would be out of place in a lot of stories that I love -- many of my favorite plots are full of coincidences and unrealistic surprises -- but when the first half feels so real, so visceral, it's hard to suddenly make that switch. In the first half, the world is set up and we're told that violent death is a messy and uncomfortable certainty for these types of people, which makes it offputting when that seems to change. (There is also, in the second half, a bit too much talk about how special Americans seem to these Old World types.)But, even at its most contrived it's still better than your average spy thriller, and the voice and characters carry the reader through when the plot gets lost now and then. Night Soldiers is smart, well-written, and suspenseful, as well as being a nuanced look into a version of WWII we don't see all that often. You learn a lot of history that normal American classes skip over, and it always feels vital and close by.

In Bulgaria, in 1934, on a muddy street in the river town of Vidin, Khristo Stoianev saw his brother kicked to death by fascist militia.Can the action of this opening sentence be the foundation for excellent character development? A resounding yes. What better way to describe the motivation for a young man to want to fight for the NKVD, Stalin's secret police? Yes, there is some violence in this book, but not so much that you feel bloodied yourself.The novel is well-written combining characterization and plot. As with most spy novels, one must pay attention because not everything is as it seems. Furst reminds us with:But nothing here was what it seemed. Even the gray stone of the buildings hid within itself a score of secret tints, to be revealed only by one momentary strand of light. At first, the tide of secrecy that rippled through the streets had made him tense and watchful, but in time he realized that in a city of clandestine passions, everyone was a spy. Amours. Fleeting or eternally renewed, tender or cruel, a single sip or an endless bacchanal, they were the true life and business of a place where money was never enough and power always drained away. And, since the first days of his time there, he had had his own secrets.With this novel, I was given greater understanding of how much was lost by those who fought in WWII. Not just those who gave their lives, but, as importantly, by those who lived through it day by day, both civilians and those who served their governments in covert activities. The mute agony of these places - themselves lost in the silence of the endless, frozen land - would finish him if he permitted himself to feel it, so he had, by self-direction, grown numb, and now felt nothing about anything. There was no other defense.I have awarded this 5 stars and I might be feeling generous today. But certainly it is at the 4/5 line, either top of one group or bottom of the other. I've already ordered the next in the collection, Dark Star, I might as well give it the benefit of the doubt.

What do You think about Night Soldiers (2002)?

If I had opened randomly to any point in this book and read 3 pages, I would have thought it to be a 5 star book. Furst is absolutely masterful at painting a scene, creating a mood, evoking a time and place, and fleshing out incredibly varied but wholly believable characters. If this were a movie, Furst would win an academy award for cinematography in a heart beat. But to my mind, he's a lousy director. Nothing propels the story forward from one of these wonderful scenes to the next. Several times, great detail went into explaining the back story and motivations of a character that then dies and is completely and permanently removed from the story moments later. Perhaps that artistically mimics the savage randomness of war where lives are snuffed out with no warning, but in a book it just disrupts the flow of the narrative. At first I thought this book was going to be wonderful, but in the end I only finished it out of stubbornness, long since having stopped caring what would happen.There is so much to respect here, but I just couldn't get into the story. That may not be the case for everyone. It should be noted that Furst's books are intensely researched so that the fictional goings on exist on an accurate back drop of historical events (both big and small). Also, his imagination for richly detailed characters who are very much a product of their times is nothing short of amazing. For a real WWII buff, I could imagine that Furst is tough to beat. From beginning to end, I really wanted to like this book, but I just never really did.
—Austin

Furst -- A Better Novelist Than HistorianI enjoy Alan Furst's novels immensely! As many reviewers have stated (here and in the press), Furst is a master at depicting Eastern Europe in the interwar years. His strength is atmosphere. He paints a picture in words that reflects the precariousness of life. As you read, you can FEEL yourself in Paris or Moscow or Madrid. You can SEE the characters, the cafes, and the seedy hotels. You can SMELL the Gauloises and TASTE the pastis.Furst's plots, however, are weaker -- with twists more than slightly unbelievable (Stoianev just "happens" to see the Brotherhood Front symbol painted on the half-sunken barge in the Danube!). His cavalier approach to historical facts undermines his work as well -- either he researches poorly or underestimates his readers. I am willing to grant him artistic license, but he dubs the POUM as an anarchist organization (It's "Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista" -- a Trotskyist group. One can't be both Marxist and anarchist). Since this was George Orwell's militia -- described so well in the renowned "Homage to Catalonia" -- Furst fails Spanish Civil War 101! He also speaks of Stoianev's girlfriend frequenting a cafe in Paris because Picasso and Modigliani are seen there. Modigliani died in 1920. She must have hoped to meet his ghost! Unfortunately, there are a number of such lapses.Don't let me sound too strident. Furst's novels -- starting with "Night Soldiers" -- are good reading. I've read them all. They're solid three star material!
—Manray9

This is a gripping novel that is hard to put down if you are a fan of the spy/thriller genre. It will keep you awake til the wee hours, saying, "OK, just a few more pages, and then I'll put it down." Highly recommended if you want to be torn out of your doldrums and spun into a world of intrigue, conspiracies, manipulations and machinations, all with the second World War as both a prequel and a culmination. Relying on exhaustive research, and an even more fertile imagination, Furst has created a living tableau that replays in the mind long after you've put the book down. Why only 4 stars? Sometimes, a surfeit of something good is its own enemy. Quite frankly, at times my head ached, there was so much there to take in and digest: the historical verisimilitude was overwhelming and I just didn't want to take in any more. My bad. Sometimes I become a lazy reader and want to be spoon-fed cheap entertainment. There are *indeed* times when I don't want to think, or feel, too much. At another time, I no doubt would speak in superlatives and bestow 5 glowing stars. It's not him, it's me. (Imagine admitting that, in print!)
—Julie

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