Dark Star: A Novel |
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List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $10.17
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Manufacturer: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Average Customer Rating:  
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PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375759994
ISBN: 0375759999
Label: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Manufacturer: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 464
Publication Date: 2002-07-09
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Release Date: 2002-07-09
Studio: Random House Trade Paperbacks
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Editorial Reviews:
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Paris, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague, 1937. In the back alleys of nighttime Europe, war is already under way. André Szara, survivor of the Polish pogroms and the Russian civil wars and a foreign correspondent for Pravda, is co-opted by the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence service, and becomes a full-time spymaster in Paris. As deputy director of a Paris network, Szara finds his own star rising when he recruits an agent in Berlin who can supply crucial information. Dark Star captures not only the intrigue and danger of clandestine life but the day-to-day reality of what Soviet operatives call special work.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Unfulfilled promise by an extremely talented author
Comment: The year is 1937. Andre Szara, a journalist for Pravda, is recruited against his will into doing a few little jobs for the Soviet secret service. Szara, a Russified Jew who grew up in Poland, has an acute sense of survival, but with the Stalinist purges in full swing, he can't very well refuse. Szara's work provides the perfect cover, and he travels to both Germany and Paris, eventually taking on greater and greater responsibilities and discovering dark secrets that culminate in the horrific invasion of Poland in September, 1939.
The first half of this book let me know that I was going to be treated to one of the best novels I have ever read. Furst is a first-class historian and storyteller, and he does a great job of constructing the trap in which Szara finds himself. Szara is completely realistic and believable as a character. As a writer, he's witty and detached; as a Jew and a survivor of World War I and numerous pogroms, he knows what it takes to stay alive; as a spy, he becomes immersed in layers and layers of intrigue and double-dealing. The decadent, dangerous world of prewar Europe is described with such telling details that it all comes alive.
I have to say I was disappointed in how the later part of the story played itself out. Furst did such a good job painting Szara into a corner that he has a hard time getting out of it, and as a result the book loses focus and sags badly. I find myself reading a more conventional escape thriller, and missed the surprising insights and twists that made the first part of the book so good.
Reviewer: Elizabeth Clare, co-author of the historical novel "To the Ends of the Earth: The Last Journey of Lewis and Clark"
Customer Rating:
Summary: Alan Furst at the top of his game
Comment: I've read most of Alan Furst's novels and I think Dark Star should be ranked alongside Night Soldiers as his two absolute best. To borrow a phrase from another reviewer, this is writing by grownups for grownups. The intricacy of the plotting, the evocations of time and place, the attention to detail- it's all fantastic. It's a measure of Furst's skill that the reader feels sympathy for Andre Szara, an operative for the NKVD, which was the sword and shield of Stalin's monstrous regime.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Way too ponderous for me
Comment: I am a huge WWII history fan, but this novel is so enthralled with its own overwrought descriptions of minor details (eg, the wine offered to Szara by the rich French Jew) that the story is lost and I stopped caring about the (lack of) action. I gave up half way through. On to the new translation of War and Peace.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An honest masterpiece of ambience
Comment: Alan Furst's "Dark Star" bravely addresses two taboos of the 20th century history: the intrinsic but carefully camouflaged evil of communism and the role of Jewish individuals (quite a few of them) in, first, propagating it and then falling victim to it. At the same time, however, the novel masterfully conveys the tragic choice laying before the conscientious people who lived in those dark times, i.e., between the Nazi monster and the Stalinist moloch, both totalitarian and inhuman.
Alan Furst's trademark style is full of ambience and irony, and his facts are almost always correct (two exceptions: the province of Galicia was not named after the Spanish Galicia - the name is a corrupted form of the original eponym "Halicz" - and the Russian army did not enter Paris after the battle of Waterloo in 1815.) Overall, the novel is a true feast for discerning readers.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Enjoy WWII fiction? You'll gobble this up!
Comment: Dark Star, like Night Soldiers, is a solid four stars. People who seek lots of action in spy books need to go elsewhere for their kicks. The action in this book is in Furst's rich descriptions of a sordid period in world history. And the descriptiveness of Stalin and Hitler's chokehold on European affairs more than gives me all the intensity I needed. I've found that when reading books like this that have a lot of characters with Eastern European and Russian names, that I enjoy the book more if I write those names down along with their various roles. That way, I can refer back to the list to clarify who's who and keep the storyline straight. Even then, there are occasional gaps where I have trouble piecing the story together. It's as though the author gives us A, B, C, E, and G, while making us figure out D and F.
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