Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Alan Furst


I case you missed it, there was an interview of sorts in the extra special Sunday New York Times travel magazine with our favorite author, Alan Furst. Furst seems a little too shy to truly give good interview (as they say), but there are some interesting bits.

Furst reveals he was a bit of a later bloomer, not really finding his stride as a novelist until after a trip to Europe in the mid-1980s. He happened to be in Moscow when the Russians shot down a Korean airliner: "The city was filled with a nervous tension. They were frightened and expectant. When I checked into the National Hotel, the person who took my passport was hidden behind a curtain. You couldn't see the face. Everything was murky, suspect, dangerous. I thought, These people are not like us. Not at all."

Furst, on the kinds of people who figure in his books: "People in the era, you had a very narrow choice. You could be a victim, you could be a hero, you could be a villain, or you could be a fugitive. But you could not just stand by. If you were in Europe between 1933 and 1945, you had to be something."

Furst, on Vacherin, unpasteurized French cheese: "It's a wonderful cheese. You peel off the top and eat it with a spoon. The really good Vacherin isn't pasteurized. Kills a couple of people a year." He shrugs; that's the price you pay for living life at a certain pitch."

According to Amazon, Furst's The Foreign Correspondent comes out in May.

UPDATE (6/1): It has arrived. I'll be reading it tout suite. Janet Maslin gives it a nice write-up in today's NY Times. Also, you may note that Andre Szara--who I always thought was a figment of Furst's imagination--thanks me in comments. Hmmm.

Posted by jwb at 7:23 AM   

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