by JULIET WATERS

The world is not what it was in 1940. It’s hard to imagine, these days, the British Secret Service recruiting the editor of a small literary magazine to blow up a vital oil export route between Romania and Germany. But there are writers’ writers, and then there’s Alan Furst, the writers’ spy writer.

In The Blood of Victory, Furst’s latest hero, I.A. Serebin, “minor Russian writer and émigré,” brings us back to a time when writing was dangerous. When writers had to flee their countries and go to Paris, Istanbul, and Budapest, not just to hang out and write in cafés, but to stay alive. “Like a giant broom, the war had swept them all to the far edge of Europe.” At 42, this is Serebin’s fifth war. He considers himself “expert in the matter of running, hiding, or not caring.” He also seems to be expert at other things. “It was his fate, he believed, that life smacked him in the head every chance it got, then paid him back in women.”

When we first meet Serebin he’s in bed with the wife of a Vichy diplomat. Marie-Galante Labonnière is the kind of woman who shows up at the door in the middle of the night, “sable coat and bare feet, as she’d promised at dinner.” They come from a time and place where cigarettes are so ubiquitous that smoke seems to run through people’s veins. Where you might go to a movie and witness two men from the audience run out of the theatre, followed by gunshots in the alley. Where your lover might be a Nazi. And where, as Marie-Galante puts it: “First you say you’ll pretend to do what they want, then you do what they want, then you’re one of them… Oldest story in the world: if you don’t stand up to evil it eats you first and kills you later, but not soon enough.” Serebin, despite his desire to remain detached and edit his little literary journal, will choose, of course, to stand up to evil.

One reviewer has compared reading Furst to watching Casablanca for the first time. But in Casablanca one doesn’t get descriptions like this one, as Serebin looks out a taxi window in Istanbul: “Melon rinds with clouds of flies, a thousand cats, rust stains on porphyry columns, strange light, strange shadows in a haze of smoke and dust, a street where blind men sold nightingales.” His writing is so deeply satisfying on so many levels that another reviewer calls him the Leonard Cohen of spy writing, while yet another compares him to Graham Greene.

Also worth noting about Furst, a native New Yorker, is that he has written an entire book set in the Second World War with barely a mention of the U.S. Only an American wouldn’t sound nasty writing a paragraph like: “They [Serebin and his cab driver] talked and talked. About poetry, about history, stars, bugs, tarot, Roosevelt. The man had a passion for the minutiae of the world.” If one of Furst’s goals is to bring alive a memory of a world where one could honestly characterize an American president as minutiae, he’s succeeded. If another of his goals is to keep reminding his fellow citizens about a world that exists outside of their history, he may be getting there. The Blood of Victory seems to have established a sturdy niche on the bestseller list. Through seven novels, Furst has remained devoted to the wartime politics of Southeastern Europe, and to the horrors of that particular time. His European cast of characters is so beautifully and precisely drawn, he undermines any perception of the U.S. as a nation of narcissists.

Furst’s writing is dark, witty, intelligent, moral and strangely hopeful—even when his lucky-in-love hero is thinking, “In this life… there is only one thing worth waking up for in the morning, and it isn’t getting out of bed and facing the world.” :

The Blood of Victory by Alan Furst,
Random House, hc, 237pp, $37.95