Customer Reviews

36 Yalta Boulevard (St. Martin's Minotaur Mysteries) [UNABRIDGED]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Nothing is more exciting in a literary series than charting the growth, maturity, and expanding talents of a writer, especially one like Olen Steinhauer whose first book, Bridge of Sighs, was also the first in this series the author is building. Bridge of Sighs offered a fresh exploration of a fascinating genre, and was immediately nominated for prizes (an Edgar) and lauded by critics. It was difficult to see how Steinhauer could better Bridge of Sighs. But he - in a sense - did, with The Confession that offered a darker (even for noir) literary vision, and a tale and characters even more morally complex and intriguing than that of Bridge. Steinhauer's progression continues with his latest book 36 Yalta Boulevard in which he bolds creates a sympathetic protagonist out of Brano Sev, a decidedly complex and dark figure from his previous novels. Sev, expertly fleshed out in the past, emerges in 36 Yalta as infinitely more complicated. Fascinatingly, Steinhauer breathes new life into Sev amid a fast-paced story that is literally impossible to stop reading. 36 Yalta is a cracking thriller, which is not slowed one iota by the attention paid to Sev's complexities and growth.

Steinhauer could have satisfied his readership by repeating the style and theme of Bridge of Sighs in his future books, a la Dan Brown with Angels and Demons/Da Vinci Code. This is not to say that 36 Yalta lacks the attributes of Steinhauer's previous books. It contains all the gritty communist-era atmosphere, moral complexity, and great dialogue of Bridge and Confession. In this way, Steinhauer's fans feel immediately at home in the pages of 36 Yalta. But clearly Steinhauer, like his characters and his plots, is not content to take the predictable route, no matter how successful. As a result, his readers are treated to a book (Yalta Boulevard) and literary series (his three books together) that startles and intrigues as well as entertains, and - equally as exciting-his readers can witness the progress of a writer who grows stronger and more skilled with each book. One can only wonder: what's next in this series? The answer will certainly be: like 36 Yalta Boulevard, a wild, wonderful ride that brings the reader to a destination he least expects.

Olen Steinhauer's Major Brano Sev is part of his Commmunist nation's security apparatus. He awakes in a Viennese park, remembering nothing, an Austrian policeman helping him up. Asked who he is, Sev produces a library card bearing the name Bernard Richter. Richter was murdered last night, but the Austrian policeman doesn't know this - and at the moment Sev remembers nothing, not even his name.

Thus begins the grim tale of this dedicated investigator, torturer and murderer, this agent of a people's republic whose life is devoted to protecting an oppressive regime where, the joke goes, there are only three classes: those in prison, those who have been in prison and those who will be in prison.

As Brano recalls who he is, he remembers that he was to murder Richter the night before, but can't recall if that was accomplished. He remembers as well that he is the intelligence rezident in Vienne for his nation. He makes his way back to a hotel that he headquartered in, having found the embassy riddled with bugs. His assistant shows up and tells him he must leave Austria immediately. At the airport, Austrian agents try to detain him. Escapting, he boards the flight, arrives in his native country and is immediately arrested, interrogated for months and eventually released to become an assembly line worker in some obscure factory, his career in the intelligence and security organs seemingly over.

Sound complex? It become far more so as Brano's mentor intervenes and he is sent to his home village to investigate a returned defector. The corpses and traitors start surfacing soon after Brano's arrival.

Steinhauer's plot is complex, His characters are rich and cover the carnival of nationalities and forces we expect in Cold War Austria. Brano is the center of something, but we never find out what until the last few pages, much to the credit of Steinhauer. There is Dijana Frankovic, half Brano's age, beautiful, bohemian, who shares she is in love with Brano, having known him for but a few minutes. Well, maybe she's a Russian spy. Or maybe not.

Brano is a dedicated Communist: he even drove his father from home, something his mother still regrets. Brano is a creature of the state, thinking nothing of torturing and murdering in the name of the state, not because he is a sadist, but because he is a believer - though that belief is becoming frayed after so long.

Vienna's expatriate society, Austrian intelligence, CIA, religous groups dedicated to freeing Communist countries swirl around Brano. At first, Brano feels abandoned by his masters, but he labors on, knowing that nothing happens by accident. He pursues the scent of conspiracy.

Bit by bit, Brano pulls the pieces together, not without the occasional bit of violence and always with a neat surprise invented by Steinhauer, who is quite a writer.

Overall, a complex thriller about grim countries in grim times where grim men like Brano Sev served a purpose. Steinhauer's portrait of Brano Sev is dark, perhaps depressing. A masterful thriller of a bygone era. If you've seen the film "The Third Man," you'll love this book.

Jerry

Olen Steinhauer's fiction has always confused me. How can it be that such emotionally finessed, intricately plotted, quitely observed and moodily rendered writing has not yet hit the heights it so obviously deserves? After re-reading this, the third of Steinhauer's sequence, the mystery remains: 36 Yalta Boulevard continues in the tradition of brutal excellence encountered in The Bridge of Sighs and The Confession; indeed in this latest Sixties installment the author's landscape grows vividly, shifting his pared-down sights to a more clearly defined world of cold-war espionage (his earlier work could be described as a kind of Stalinist-Noir policier fiction) that takes in not only his own fictional East European country, but also Hungary and a confused, confusing, melting-pot Austria.

Unlike the two writers with whom he is most obviously compared, the young Le Carré and the gilded Alan Furst, Steinhauer rides his cluttered communist tram bus down the middle: neither over nor under writing, offering none of the easy romanticism to which both other authors are sometimes prone. Instead his latest work continues to show us the clear (and wonderfully nuanced) evolution of a national psychological mindset: shows us people who must always lie to hold on to their own sense of a personal honesty beyond The Party, the Nation, the Family and even lovers (for who can be sure of anything or anyone in this world?). Perhaps it is the glaring honesty - and imperfection - of his life-battered fateless characters that holds Steinhauer back from the best-seller/Hollywood calling that he deserves. However, for readers interested in a telling, grey-toned mirror image of Le Carré's troubled Goethe-yearning Double-Firsts or Furst's cocksure heroes look no further.

For a true insight into the fatalistic souls of people exiled from their own imagination by communism, Steinhauer's works - filled with the bleak realities of human experience, and ocassional moments of clarity and hope, as well as cracking (and in this case labyrinthine) plots that echo but never merely copy the true history of the Iron Curtain countries in the post war decades - are compulsory reading.

In 1966, Major Brano Sev is sent from his Communist nation to Vienna to uncover Code Name Gavrilo, a traitor leaking information to the West. However, the State Security Officer, who has replaced the murdered Kristina Urben, wakes up with amnesia in a park. He learns that the mission was accomplished, but upon disembarking the plane he is arrested for turning traitor too as his assistant Lochert painted quite a spin on what really happened in Vienna.

Brano lives due to the interactions of his former superior, Colonel Cerny. After six months in a factory, Cerny assigns Brano to visit his hometown of Bobrka to interrogate a possible defector Jan Soroka. Welcomed home by his mother, but no one else as everyone knows what he does for a living, Brano becomes the prime suspect in the murder of Jacob Bieneck. He does little to defend himself against the frame as he assumes this is his cover to enable him to learn the truth. Instead he finds himself back in Vienna wondering who besides Lochert betrayed him and why, but he believes that it is probably too late to prove he did not commit homicide.

This Cold War espionage thriller will remind the audience of the early works of LeCarre although the key protagonist is an Eastern block spy. Brano is a terrific protagonist as he follows orders to such a degree that he jeopardizes himself as he never considered that he was being set up until his forced return to Vienna in spite of Lochert's devastating misinformation campaign. Olen Steinhauer writes another fantastic tale. If you have not read him you are missing quite a suspense treat (see THE CONFESSION and BRIDGE OF SIGHS).

Harriet Klausner

First of all it is clear why this is a good novel: the excellence of the writing, the palpable description of the sadness and loneliness of life as a spy and particularly a Russian spy in the 60's, and the feelings evoked for the emotional poverty of the Russians under Stalin and Malenkov and their progeny.

In many respects it approaches (but sadly misses) the characterization of Deaver's Willi Kohl in the unheralded but brilliant "Garden of Beasts" and of course the greatest of the Russian detectives, Arkady Renko particularly in Cruz Smith's recent (and fantastic) "Wolves Eat Dogs."

But Steinhauer seems to miss on the people surrounding Sev. We know right off the bat that he's been set up and the "why," like a good poker hand, is kept from us for many chapters. But the people surrounding Sev, his mother, Jan, Jan's wife, Colonel Cerney, all provide great opportunity for deeper analysis but instead we get a bunch of 3" by 5" card descriptions.

Likewise I really had no feelings for Sev. For example, C. W, Sughrue in James Crumley's "The Last Good Kiss" is an irritating, self-abusing protaganist. Couldn't stand the guy. If he lived next door I would move. But you have feelings for him. Ditto Bernard Samson of Len Deighton fame. But Sev is like your ex-sister in law's third husband that you see every Christmas 'OK. Who is this guy? What's he mean to me?'

I will read Steinhauer again (and again) because he is very talented. But 36 Yalta Boulevard was too fragmented and superficial. 4 stars. Larry Scantlebury