36 Yalta Boulevard: A Novel (Yalta Boulevard Quintet, 3)

36 Yalta Boulevard is the address of the Ministry of State Security in Olen Steinhauer fictional eastern European country. His lead character, a brooding, relentless operative, Brano Sev, sets out on what may or may not be a set up that costs him his life or at least a couple dozen years in the gulag. The plot has Brano working for the man who recruited him to the service at the end of the Second World War and/or invisible hands behind the scenes. Brano is never quite sure but his faith in his superior is absolute, even when he's accused of murder, abused in prison, and has the opportunity to defect. This is where Steinhauer shines. A run of the mill espionage novel would have this guy break and dash off with a pretty girl, a fancy car, and all the trappings of western decadence. Not Brano Sev. He's loyal. His willing ignorance of machinations above his rank is Brano's greatest fault, that and his failure to accept that others, including his mother and another expatriate, might actually care for him. These elements serve to bolster a story that reveals a side of the cold war mostly ignored by popular novelists. I recommend this book for patient readers interested in exploring a place where things are never quite good, just less bad at times.

I had never heard of Olen Steinhauer before reading "A Bridge of Sighs", but once I started this book I was compelled to read the remaining four ( Confession, 36 Yalta Boulevard, Liberation Movements, Victory Square). Mr. Steinhauer writes of an unnamed Eastern European country (possibly Roumania) after the second World War; the political changes that take place during the decades following; and the effects these changes have on a group of detectives in the People's Militia. The author has created a vivid picture of the country during this time of turmoil and developed characters that are sometimes sympathetic, occasionally repulsive, but always interesting.

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

36 Yalta Boulevard by Olen Steinhauer is brought vividly to life with the expert and nuanced narration of Yuri Rascovsky is this complete and unabridged Blackstone Audibook CD edition (11 hours, 30 minutes on 9 discs). The story of a purely loyal man who serves the Ministry for State Security, who always does whatever the authorities ask. When he receives orders to travel to the village of a potential defector, he obeys; and when a murdered corpse turns up and he is framed for the crime, he assumes this is all part of what is expected. Yet when he is sentenced to exile in Vienna, at long last he begins to question what he is doing and why, and the surprising answers may yet reveal that unthinking loyalty is as harmful a crime as open rebellion. An enthralling parable of ambiguous moral choices and difficult decisions.

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.