To delve into this novel large it takes several conditions. First have time to move ahead in her reading corner, a novel start by not reading a few pages is to give a minimum of chances to seduce us. Then it must have something to record the names and functions of many characters. Walking in the CIA and KGB requires not to be buried under many names and aliases. Finally the main events and political figures should be known to the reader, is what gives spice to the story.
I love how the novel begins, a small interlude leads to Rome In 1978, a killer called "Calabrese" assassinate Pope Albino Luciani and steals Kholstomer folder. Following a transaction between two members of the CIA, the Witch and the sorcerer's apprentice who oversee the transition from a communist agent in the West.
These two scenes form the core of the novel, the first because an event is not free, it follows a very long journey that originated much further and much earlier, one of the lessons of the book is to penetrate below the surface of things. The second scene takes us years on the world of moles, infiltrators must be unmasked, convert, use, what is exciting to follow.
Littell actually start the rest in 1950, shortly before the creation of the CIA, where young students come out of Yale, Harvard, are recruited to embark on an exciting and dangerous. We then follow the fate of many fictional characters, American and Russian but not limited to, the Mossad is part of the Hungarian resistance at the Budapest uprising of 1956, the resistant Cuban who took part in the famous episode of the Bay pigs in 1961 ...
The characters are deeply human, we watch them grow within their families, with their doubts, their joys, their dilemmas. Other, more real, we are more familiar: the Kennedy brothers, Reagan, Massoud, bin Laden, Andropov, Gorbachev, Elstsine, Putin ...
Read the table of contents is equivalent to circumnavigate the world, the chapters starting with Moscow, Frankfurt, Berlin, Washington, Budapest, Vienna, Cuba, Peshawar, a world where the great powers struggle, their agents live in hiding, secrecy. The silence of these little mundane life is paradoxical. It is close to death that often touches the waiting, solitude and secrecy that are the fruit.
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