ALAN FURST
1941–
Historical Espionage Novels
Alan Furst was born in Newark, New Jersey, and brought up on the West Side of Manhattan. He received a B.A. from Oberlin and an M.A. from Penn State. He was urged by his grandfather to be a teacher and write only in his spare time—advice that, fortunately for us, he refused.
His early novels were reasonably successful but it was not until 1988, with the publication of Night Soldiers, that his career took off and in the process revitalized the entire genre of spy novels. He called it “historical espionage,” but it was the depth and intensity of his writing about heroes who had to depend mainly on intelligence and luck that set him apart from the authors of most such thrillers except for Joseph Conrad, Eric Ambler, and John le Carré. His books, besides Night Soldiers, including The Polish Officer, Dark Star, Dark Voyage, and The World at Night, are all exceptional—that list contains several very good books, but you can count on him, whatever the title, not only to teach you about the dark secret world of the period from 1933 to 1944 but also to cause you to wonder how we ever survived as a nation and, indeed, as a society. Furst’s knowledge of the underside of the period is unparalleled, and he is a very good writer whom I highly recommend.
CZESLAW MILOSZ
1911–2004
The Captive Mind
Czeslaw Milosz was born in 1911 in Tsarist Russia, to partly Polish, partly Lithuanian parents, and was brought up in the multinational milieu of Wilno (Vilnius). He graduated in 1934 with a degree in law and the next year received an award from the Alliance Française in Paris. During the late thirties he worked for the Polish State Broadcasting Company, but with the emergence of the Nazis he became active in underground circles in Warsaw, where he spent most of the war. Between 1946 and 1951 he served as a member of the Polish Foreign Service, but despite his initial sympathies for radical change he left his post as cultural attaché in Paris and remained in the West thereafter.
The Captive Mind (1953) is his most influential book. Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s and Furst’s works, it is not fiction, but it is as gripping as anything in their books. It was written in Paris at the time when a majority of French intellectuals resented their country’s dependence on American help and placed their hopes on what they saw as a new world to the East, ruled by a leader of incomparable wisdom and virtue—Joseph Stalin. Those, like Albert Camus, who pointed to the existence of a network of concentration camps as the very foundation of the Socialist system, were vilified and ostracized. His book, as Milosz states in a note at the beginning of it, “displeased practically everybody.” Admirers of Soviet Communism found it insulting, while anti-Communists suspected its author of being a Marxist at heart. “A lonely venture,” he went on to say, “it has since been vindicated by facts and defends itself well against both kinds of criticism.”
Its subject is the “vulnerability,” as Milosz called it, of the twentieth-century mind to seduction by sociopolitical doctrines and its readiness to accept totalitarian terror for the sake of a hypothetical future. As such, the book transcends limitations of place and moment as it explores the deeper causes of today’s longing for any, even the most illusory, certainty.
Americans may say, fifty years after the publication of this book, that its comments do not apply to us; any of us who were ever tempted by Communist and totalitarian social concepts have long since changed our minds and, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, have begun even to accept non-Communist Russians as partners in the future. But, as Milosz would point out if he were still alive, there are many kinds of totalitarianism in the world, many of them religious, and we are perhaps just as vulnerable as we ever were to the lure of “hypothetical certainties.” Or if “we” feel we are not, we have to recognize that there are many of “them” who are willing to risk and even to give up their lives for the sake of their beliefs. It is for that reason that this book is important, although it is not pleasant to read.
Czeslaw Milosz was a good poet as well as a historian, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. He died at the age of ninety-three in 2004.
SÉBASTIEN JAPRISOT
1931–2003
The Sleeping Car Murders
A Very Long Engagement
Sébastien Japrisot (an anagram for his real name, Jean Baptiste Rossi) was born in 1931—the same year as le Carré—and he too is a very good writer. He published his first novel when he was seventeen, and wrote dozens since then. He wrote in French and, while not all of his books are available in English, his two translated works are both terrific reads.
The Sleeping Car Murders (1963) was published in the same year as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but it is a very different book from le Carré's. It is much more traditional—except for one very special thing. The story is rather simple: a sleeping car arrives in Paris with a dead woman in one of the compartments. The police are alerted and at first the investigation seems to be routine. Attempts are made to discover other occupants in the compartment besides the murdered woman. But these attempts lead nowhere, because whenever a fellow passenger is found, he or she too is dead. Something here is very mysterious and very frightening, especially for two persons in the compartment, a young woman and a seventeen-year-old boy. It seems that the boy was more interested in the young woman than she was in him, but as the net is drawn tighter and tighter around her she becomes terrified and tries to enlist the boy’s help. He refuses to help her. Why? She doesn’t know, the detective doesn’t know, and you don’t know. But then, suddenly, you do know and are deeply satisfied by this fine love story.
A Very Long Engagement (1993) is a story about a young man named Manuch, or “Cornflower,” and a young woman named Mathilde. She is wealthy but crippled by polio; he is poor and a soldier in the Great War. The first sentence of the book is this: “Once upon a time there were five French soldiers who had gone off to war, because that’s the way of the world.” The rest of the book, which is inexpressibly surprising, astonishing, and moving, is told in that same style, as if the author doesn’t care about his characters and thinks you don’t either, or at least you don’t have to; they’re just ordinary people, the kind that other people don’t care about. But before you have read fifty pages you care about one of them so much your heart aches. This is Mathilde.
They were young lovers just before Manuch left for the army, and that too is the way of the world. That Mathilde should love him is, for Manuch, the most astonishing thing that has ever happened and ever will happen, and his happiness is so overwhelming that there are times when he can’t breathe. He goes off to war promising to take care of himself and assuring her that he will return soon, that they will be married and have children and do all the good things that good people do. She is not as sure as he is because she can’t walk easily and often is confined to a wheelchair, but at least she knows they can make love because they have done so, once, before he left. And if once, why not many times?