The Foreign Correspondent: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Alan Furst
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  65 reviews
Sales Rank: 15301
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0812967976
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780812967975
ASIN: 0812967976
Publication Date: May 15, 2007
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Product Description
From Alan Furst, whom The New York Times calls “America’s preeminent spy novelist,” comes an epic story of romantic love, love of country, and love of freedom–the story of a secret war fought in elegant hotel bars and first-class railway cars, in the mountains of Spain and the backstreets of Berlin. It is an inspiring, thrilling saga of everyday people forced by their hearts’ passion to fight in the war against tyranny.
By 1938, hundreds of Italian intellectuals, lawyers and journalists, university professors and scientists had escaped Mussolini’s fascist government and taken refuge in Paris. There, amid the struggles of émigré life, they founded an Italian resistance, with an underground press that smuggled news and encouragement back to Italy. Fighting fascism with typewriters, they produced 512 clandestine newspapers. The Foreign Correspondent is their story.
Paris, a winter night in 1938: a murder/suicide at a discreet lovers’ hotel. But this is no romantic traged–it is the work of the OVRA, Mussolini’s fascist secret police, and is meant to eliminate the editor of Liberazione, a clandestine émigré newspaper. Carlo Weisz, who has fled from Trieste and secured a job as a foreign correspondent with the Reuters bureau, becomes the new editor.
Weisz is, at that moment, in Spain, reporting on the last campaign of the Spanish civil war. But as soon as he returns to Paris, he is pursued by the French Sűreté, by agents of the OVRA, and by officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service. In the desperate politics of Europe on the edge of war, a foreign correspondent is a pawn, worth surveillance, or blackmail, or murder.
The Foreign Correspondent is the story of Carlo Weisz and a handful of antifascists: the army officer known as “Colonel Ferrara,” who fights for a lost cause in Spain; Arturo Salamone, the shrewd leader of a resistance group in Paris; and Christa von Schirren, the woman who becomes the love of Weisz’s life, herself involved in a doomed resistance underground in Berlin.
The Foreign Correspondent is Alan Furst at his absolute best–taut and powerful, enigmatic and romantic, with sharp, seductive writing that takes the reader through darkness and intrigue to a spectacular denouement.
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 60 more reviews...
 Evocation of another world September 21, 2008
Furst is brilliant at character study, but more than that, he delivers you into another world. Pre-World II Europe becomes present. For anybody who's interested in those years of upheaval, extraordinary courage as well as human frailty and sinister ideologies, please get any of his extraordinary books.
A good read September 15, 2008
Alan Furst came to my attention through a New York Times Book Review about his newest book. After a little bit of research, mostly here on Amazon people's lists, I bought "Night Soldiers" and loved it so much that I immediately bought "The Foreign Correspondent" and enjoyed it almost as much. I now have "Dark Star" waiting for me to start on a flight I'm taking on Wednesday.
These are great books of an era as well as a travelogue of European countries I love already and some to which I've never been but definitely will visit now. Oh, also, be careful. You'll want to take up smoking and sit alone in dark areas. Be strong.
 boring, pointless, a total waste of time August 9, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
What on earth was the point of that? Cardboard characters mouthing turgid expositions of the state of the world. Plodding style showing utter ignorance of how commas are used. Stuff happens, and then more stuff happens, and then some more; plot points are portentously introduced and then abandoned; then suddenly nothing happens any more because the book is over. What happened to the traitor? What happened to Ferrara's book? What happened to Liberazione? What happened to Emil, and why did the cops pounce at the end? What was Christa doing in Berlin in the first place? What were the consequences of the murder at the beginning? Who the heck cares any more? Dreadful.
This is a terrific book. August 1, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
As with the other books by Alan Furst, this is a book about brave people risking their lives in often doomed causes, because they believe in them and know that what they are doing is right.
superb, fast, easy reading July 16, 2008
Alan Furst's "Foreign Correspondent" is an easy and fascinating read, especially if one is familiar with the scenario, i.e. Paris, Berlin, and parts of Italy. I am fortunate in having some familiarity with all three.
This was a page-turner, the likes of which I had not read in a long while. Thank you, Alan Furst, for writing "The Foreign Correspondent".
I am about to begin reading "The Spies of Warsaw", but am actually saving it for an anticipated, hopefully short, hospital stay. If it "grabs" me as did the Foreign Correspondent, I plan to get all of the other novels written by Mr. Furst. And yes, I am a child of that era (actually, a holocaust survivor).
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