Also, his imagination for richly detailed characters who are very much a product of their times is nothing short of amazing. It should be noted that Furst's books are intensely researched so that the fictional goings on exist on an accurate back drop of historical events (both big and small). There is so much to respect here, but I just couldn't get into the story. At first I thought this book was going to be wonderful, but in the end I only finished it out of stubbornness, long since having stopped caring what would happen. Perhaps that artistically mimics the savage randomness of war where lives are snuffed out with no warning, but in a book it just disrupts the flow of the narrative. Several times, great detail went into explaining the back story and motivations of a character that then dies and is completely and permanently removed from the story moments later. Nothing propels the story forward from one of these wonderful scenes to the next. If this were a movie, Furst would win an academy award for cinematography in a heart beat. Furst is absolutely masterful at painting a scene, creating a mood, evoking a time and place, and fleshing out incredibly varied but wholly believable characters. If I had opened randomly to any point in this book and read 3 pages, I would have thought it to be a 5 star book.
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