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‘Midnight’ in a Europe of Evil
Pre-war spy thriller conquers continent
By Ariel Pinsky
F
JULY 31 ▪ 2015
ishing out a stimulating yet substantive summer novel from the
sea of fluff out there can be difficult. “Midnight in Europe,” the latest
installment in Alan Furst’s series of
World War II espionage thrillers, will
narrow your search for a quality summer read while offering an alluring
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look into the ominous, glamorous, prewar Parisian society.
A master of historical spy fiction,
Furst delivers another fast-paced and
intriguing set of intertwined stories
taking place from 1937 to 1938 across
Europe, including Paris, Madrid, Istanbul, Munich and Odessa. Furst focuses on Christian Ferrar, a brilliant
and respected lawyer working for the
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Courdet International Law
Firm in Paris
as a Spanish
émigré.
As civil
war
rages
in Spain between Franco’s
Fascist
forces and the
Army of the
Republic, Ferrar is summoned by the Spanish Embassy in Paris to join the mission of the
Oficina Tecnica in helping to supply
crucial weapons and ammunitions to
the weakening republic.
As Ferrar and partner Max de
Lyon, a Jewish gangster, are faced with
constant challenges on their quest for
illegal weapons, the reader is thrust
into multiple exotic environments and
situations, all with one common element: an inescapable pre-war tension
so thick you can feel it on the page.
For a moment Furst makes you
forget that Spain will fall to Fascist
Franco, France will be overrun by the
Nazis, and Jewish Europeans like Max
de Lyon will fight to stay out of the
camps and ghettos.
As the darkness creeps through
all corners of Europe, Furst instills fear
and anxiety in the reader, making us
question, just for a moment, “What
will be of Europe?” But, alas, history
ensures you are brutally reminded.
Some problems lie in the book’s
outrageous supply of details. Because
Furst does not provide clues as to
which are significant to the story, the
reader must decide which names, hotels, roads, restaurants and facts to remember. And the influx of characters
and places becomes dizzying as new
ones are introduced nearly every page.
However, the array of distinct and
colorful people and places also helps
Furst paint his complex and vibrant
picture of pre-World War II Europe.
He humanizes a world war by giving a
story to each character, each road, each
hotel and each town.
Though a particularly captivating
read for history buffs and fans of the
classic spy novel, “Midnight in Europe”
will appeal to any reader’s sense of romance, danger and mystery. ■
Seven Good
Stories
By Zach Itzkovitz
E
tgar Keret’s “The Seven Good
Years” resembles most of his
work in that it is offered in small
pieces — seven chapters, or “years,”
each with four to seven brief memories.
The memoir reads like a collection
of fictional short stories because of
Keret’s ability to cherry-pick memories
and mold them into a thematically consistent whole.
As a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, Keret understands that it’s not
always what you say, but what you
don’t say that holds the most weight.
“The Seven Good Years” is a series of
teases — stories charged with brevity.
The title refers to the seven years
between the birth of Keret’s son, Lev,
and the death of his father, Ephraim. It
may also refer to the seven years separating Keret from his older brother, described in a story titled “Idol Worship.”
The stories are complemented by
Keret’s sly wit. His signature style produces hybrids that are at once philosophical and colloquial, laugh-out-loud
funny and disturbing.
It would be apparent to anyone
who reads “The Seven Good Years” that
Keret could write a dramatic and profound masterpiece about drying paint,
filing taxes or the silence of loneliness.
His keen eye to metaphor, sensory image and what’s relatable is likely the
result of excessive empathy and introspection on Keret’s part.
The book’s cover is bright yellow
with an illustration of a slingshot loaded with a dove bearing an olive branch.
This paradox is amusing, even kind of
funny, in its absurdity.
It does, however, hide the book’s
inherent cover art: simply a pair of
shoes etched white in a black background. It reflects the content of a
story titled “In My Father’s Footsteps”
in the book’s final chapter. I know only
because I read it.
But to folks opening the book for
the first time, the shoes are merely
shoes; they could mean anything.
This ambiguity between the symbolic and literal is the engine on which
“The Seven Good Years” runs and may
be Keret’s most natural source of writing. I hope his heart-warming paradoxes continue to see the light of day. ■
Midnight in Europe
The Seven Good Years
By Alan