Customer Reviews

Victory Square

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I hesitated before purchasing this, due to several disappointing reviews. I couldn't diagree with them more. This books wraps it all up in a very moving, evocative way. I was able to place myself in Steinhauer's Iron Curtain country as the wheels came off in the late '80s. The author conveys the sense of disorientation that must have been common to entire generations of people who had lived through those decades.

My only quibble is that the point of view seems to shift from time to time without warning; sometimes in the middle of a paragraph. It's a little strange to switch from 1st person to 3rd and back again so abruptly. I don't know if this was always intentional, or just a lack of thorough editing.

In any case, I found this to be a thoroughly compelling conclusion to a masterful, unique series. Bravo!!!

Amazon introduced me to Olen Steinhauer - the idea of police procedurals set in Eastern Europe was intriguing. Beginning with "The Bridge of Sighs" thru all 5 books and ending with "Victory Square", you follow the same characters as their careers progress and their experience widens. Excellent way to be reminded of the history we have lived thru in a part of the world most of have little familiarity with. As with Russian novels, I made NO attempt to try to pronounce any of the names !!

The conclusion of a series of mystery novels set in a fictional Eastern European country. The fictional nation, whose name we never learn, is a synthesis of several central European states. Steinhauer has used a police procedural type approach to explore the history of these states under Communist rule. These books have been generally solid with a cast of recurring characters. This final book is set during the period of collapse of Communist rule. Events in the book are modeled closely on the collapse of the Romanian dictatorship. Steinhauer's plot involves many of the characters of his prior books and reaches back and forth to construct a plot involving events in the prior books. The quality of writing and characterization is solid. The plot is a bit far-fetched but this is probably the best book in this series.

For those of us who lived through the 'Cold War' and spent our childhood being taught to hide under desks and to 'duck and cover', these books are like a memoir of the other side of the coin. We now know how while America was enjoying the growth of the most consumer-friendly society the world has ever known, those behind the "Iron Curtain" were suffering the continuation of WW Two. All of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations, spent so much on the military and their internal security services, that little was left for the 'proletarian worker'.

When I was in Prague and West Berlin in 1968, what struck me most, was to 'darkness and drabness' on the other side of the curtain. You could look into East Berlin and see buildings that still had bullet holes in them and how the streets were covered with a grey dust. The people all had a look in their eyes that was a mixture of fear and hunger. East Berlin looked like a post-apocalyptic city, but the apocalypse was communism. In Prague the people told me they listened to the BBC and watched American and British TV shows that were broadcast in West Germany. They couldn't believe the way people in the West lived. They were especially amazed when they watched Western documentaries that cited the plight of the poor in the West. Even the poor seemed to have cars, food, housing, running water and heat. Now granted that urban housing was run down, but to those in the East, the 'poor' lived pretty well, compared to the average mid-level communist bureaucrat.

Steinhauer has done a magnificent job in documenting the life behind the Iron Curtain in its' day to day drabness and that's what makes this series of five books so important. Those of the new Post-Cold War generation, find the whole situation we lived through for forty years to be unbelievable. When I talk to my daughter's college friends, they are baffled by the stories I tell them of having been in Spain under Franco and Yugoslavia under Tito. They think of totalitarianism as nazis and fascists or some African despot, they find it incredible the lengths that the East Germans went to, to win medals at the Olympics and that one in five people worked for the Stasi (the East German secret police). When I read to them from Solzhnitsyn, they say they feel like I'm reading from an alternate universe.

This is the real importance of Steinhauer's five books, they make the implausible real and readable.

Zeb Kantrowitz

What a great series. Have exhausted all of the superlatives in my previous reviews. An extraordinary achievement that captures perfectly life in Eastern Europe. Steinhauer takes his cast of cops and secret police and spies and citizens, dreamers, revolutionaries, and artists and carries them forward from 1947 to 1990, providing the reader with the full sweep of the Cold War. What begins as a simple police procedural becomes a brilliant portrait of an entire nation. In past reviews I have mentioned Koestler, Dostoevsky, Greene, le Carré, Mankell, Nesbo, et al. Each novel in the series leans toward one or more of these authors - some are more introspective; others, more political.

The books move slowly, deliberately, but elegantly, capturing the setting, the characters, the language, the atmosphere and sustaining these throughout the whole of the series. It has been fascinating to see and feel how Steinhauer creates, builds, and maintains tension despite the slow pace.

Overall, I highly recommend these novels (along with his more recent, "The Tourist"). Stay with them, savor them, enjoy them. Bravo, Steinhauer.

This is the last of Olen Steinhauer's series of novels about Eastern Europe between 1956 and the 1980's. All five books are excellent. This one might be my favorite, but the same characters appear throughout the series so I would recommend starting with "The Bridge of Sighs."

Steinhauer's series has produced an accurate, clear and compelling view of life in (presumably) Romania during its Russian-controlled era. The series outlines the parallels the lives of different characters to the life-cycle of a totalitarian regime. "Victory Square" is the perfect coda for Emil Brod.

Indeed, the book's first chapter (26 December 1989)is a finely crafted summary of a man facing and accepting the final, or near-final, path of his life's trajectory. This chapter alone far exceeds any similar effort by LeCarre.

As well, and for what it's worth, "Victory Square" perfectly captures the chaos and clutter of Bucharest at the end of the Ceausescus regime. The "show trial" of the Ceausescus is chilling, not because its basis was wrong, but because it foreshadowed the reality that a new government, a democracy of sorts, could not by itself change the nature of man.

"Victory Square" is excellent. I look forward to Steinhauer's new series.

I loved the first one, Bridge of Sighs, and then had to adjust but also quicly grew to love the second in the series, the Confession. Then ... had to take a big jump to adopting the bad guy as the protaganist in third, 36 Yalta Boulevard, and by extension of mentorship, fourth in the series, Liberation Movements. I have not before encountered the brilliant device, used by Mr. Steinhauer, of switching protaganists in successive novels tracing the historic progression of events to develop very expanded view of the historic events. I did not even know I was going in a circle of perception until I read the brilliant concluding novel, Victory Square. These novels must be read in sequence!

I learned much, I hope, from these novels about what life was like in Eastern Europe during the cold war, from the point of view of citizens who loved their homeland and accomodated themselves to imposed ideaology, even to the point of embracing it, with patience and perspective, without giving up their respect for their own culture.

I also appreciated the concluding scenarios, which remind us that change may be nothing more than change itself.

Steinhauer's entire series set in an unnamed Eastern European Communist country has been a fantastic journey. Each has been set in a successive decade commencing in the 1940's and ending with the fall of Communism in this last entry. I am going to miss Sev, Brod, Kolyeszar, Noukas, and the other engaging characters who were woven into an intricate tapestry of crime, espionage, personal conflict, and ideological confusion. This specific book has great pace and mirrors the downfall of Nicolae Ceau'escu's Romania. The author's notes at the back regarding his research add great credibility to this fictional version of events. The plot seeks to tie loose ends from the previous works and this adds to the overall intrigue. Truly a wonderful series that I look forward to re-reading again in the coming years. It has also sparked my interest in reading some non-fiction on Ceau'escu's Romania.

What has happened to Olen Steinhauer? This volume is the disappointing conclusion to a wonderful series that has gone from strength to strength, until now. Each title showed greater complexity, talent and skill than the next, and each is a work that stands alone in its own right.

This volume, turgidly plotted, lacks suspense (the culmination is offered in Chapter 1) and the careful characterization of the earlier series. Rather, people and events pop up like cardboard cutouts: even the characters we've come to know from past novels are mere shadows of themselves. Fact and fiction mix here like oil and water, and are as palatable.

Perhaps Steinhauer was overwhelmed by the need to incorporate the information that he derived from his Fulbright Fellowship research year in Romania, cited in the preface. If so, he won't be the first author who has let history put a spoke in the wheel of fiction.

My advice: read and savor the first four books in the series, and let "Liberation Movements," the jewel in the crown, be the finale of what should have been an excellent quartet.