Blood of Victory [Import] [Paperback]

Alan Furst (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 376 pages
• Publisher: Chivers Press (2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0754092585
• ISBN-13: 978-0754092582
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,171,493 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alan Furst is widely recognized as the master of the historical spy novel. Now translated into seventeen languages, he is the bestselling author of Night Soldiers, Dark Star, The Polish Officer, The World at Night, Red Gold, Kingdom of Shadows, Blood of Victory, Dark Voyage, and The Foreign Correspondent Born in New York, he now lives in Paris and on Long Island.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Intellectual's Adventure, December 29, 2003

By 

Newt Gingrich (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Blood of Victory: A Novel (Hardcover)

Alan Furst is a good argument for simply drifting through bookstores. I had never read him before but found his writing so interesting that I am now looking for his other six novels.

In "Blood of Victory," Furst creates an émigré writer who has fled Stalin's Russia and is living in a Nazis occupied Paris. He is safe but oppressed. It is 1940 and the German-Soviet Pact is still working. Occupied Paris is not a happy place.

We first encounter I.A. Serebin boarding a boat from Romania to Turkey and find one of the interesting realities in modern civilization; travel is essential. For countries to operate people must travel and so even in a dictatorship, passage is possible if the right papers can be acquired. Ultimately, Serebin is convinced to help the British attempt to block the Danube, preventing German access to the Romanian oil that is key to their remaining both militarily and industrially functional.

Seeing the world from Istanbul, Bucharest, Paris and Belgrade shortly before the 1941 German attack is a new twist on the Second World War in the tradition of Eric Ambler and other spy chroniclers.

This is an intellectual's book (I hope I have not hurt its sales with that phrase) that carries you into a world of smart, reflective people living lives as refugees, intellectuals and activists trying to accomplish something. It is your experience of their personalities and their interactions in interesting and exotic settings, not the James Bond style heroics, which carry the book.

It is worth reading for the portrait of the fight between the Iron Shirt fascist movement and the Romanian dictatorship and, in a very Ambler-like tradition, it has vivid believable scenes of street fighting and random civilian casualties that feel all too real.

"Blood of Victory" has proven Furst is worth getting to know and I have already found two more of his works for the near future

29 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not His Best Outing, March 24, 2003

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Blood of Victory: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is the fifth of Furst's seven WWII espionage novels I've read, and not one of his best. To be sure, it has all the trademarks of his work: good writing, dedication to period detail, oppressive and dreary atmosphere, exotic locales (Paris, Istanbul, Odessa, Belgrade, etc.), a middle-aged loner protagonist caught up in the espionage intrigues of the time, love interest, a blurry web of operatives. But that's the problem-if you've read a few of his books, you've basically read this one. The characters (especially the heroes) in his books are all starting to run together rather distressingly, and he's over-reliant on atmosphere to carry the minimally plotted stories. What's worse is that the pace of this one is absolutely glacial, there's barely any thrill in the thriller!

The gist here is that in 1940 the Allies are desperate to interdict German access to the vital Romanian oil fields. Having tried to sabotage them once before, they're faced with a tough problem. Paris-based Russian émigré writer I.A. Serebin is drawn into a plot to resurrect an old spy network in an attempt to strike a blow. However, Serebin's recruitment into this venture is never really convincing, and the weaving of the plot is so oblique that it's hard to get drawn in. It's as if Furst is so faithful to building the shadow world that his characters live in that he's forgotten about the reader. Which is not to say this is an awful book or anything, just that he's written better and might benefit from straying a little further from the European theater he's set seven books in.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another fine tale of life in the shadows of WW2 Europe, September 6, 2002

By 

Bruce Trinque (Amston, CT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Blood of Victory: A Novel (Hardcover)

Alan Furst has a long-term lease on the espionage shadow world of Europe in the late 1930's and World War Two. "Blood of Victory" is another strong entry in his sequence of novels set in that world (a "sequence" is more appropriate than "series" because, with one exception, all of Furst novels involve different leading characters, although the books do share some secondary characters and certain locales, including the notorious Table 14 at Paris's Brasserie Heininger). Ilya Serebin is a Russian exile writer who finds himself recruited to work against the Germans in France and the Balkans. The secondary characters are marvelously, if efficiently drawn, aiding or obstructing Serebin's uncertain quest. Imagine a movie in cinematic black and white (and infinite shades of grey), perhaps with Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet in supporting roles, and you have an idea of the atmosphere in a Furst novel. Nothing is ever clear-cut, no-one is ever impossibly heroic. But the places and the people seem very real.