NYT's "By the Book" asks Olen Steinhauer: "What books are on your night stand?"

Olen Steinhauer
Illustration by Jillian Tamaki
NYT

I had some contact a few years ago with Mr. Steinhauer. I had just discovered his blog and his books and had started reading them - spy novels, they were - and I was much taken by them, so much so that I posted a few reviews on my blog, such as this one.

Anyway, I was curious to see what he has on his night stand (whatever a "night stand" is, as I just realized I don't know . . . okay, I do now):

David Mitchell's "Ghostwritten"

Among other books . . . Interesting, since I'm currently reading Mitchell's most recent novel The Bone Clocks: A Novel.

More on that another time . . .

Don't Know Much About This Story . . .

Amazon

I recently read Olen Steinhauer's novella, You Know What's Going On, a story in which -- despite the title -- none of the characters know what's going on. Here's a sample in what follows:

The opening hook:

What troubled him most was that he was afraid to die. Paul believed, though he had no evidence of it, that other spies did not suffer from this. But evidence holds little sway over belief, and so it was for him.

The touching murder:

"Take it out, then," said Sam.

"What?"

"The gun. Take it out and do what you have to do. I personally don't think you can. Not here in your own house. Not with your own hands. And how would you explain it to Nabil? He wants me. Like you, he wants the money. He-" Sam stopped himself because he recognized that he was rambling. Panic was starting to overcome him.

Dutifully, though, Kwambai removed a revolver from his pocket and placed it on the table, pointing it at Sam much the way Sam had pointed the Beretta at Paul Fisher. Unlike the Beretta, this was an old gun, a World War II model Colt.45. Kwambai's eyes were red around the edges. "I like you, Sam. I really do."

"But not that much."

"No," Kwambai said as he lifted the pistol and shot three times before he could think through what he was doing.

The congenial denoument:

"If I forget it, maybe it'll just go away," Benjamin said, smiling pleasantly as he got in and started the car. In no time at all, they had passed the incoming traffic and made it over the hills and back into the city. It was as if the burning house had never been. Despite the sweltering heat, Benjamin had even stopped sweating.

And thus it ends . . .

Maybe those bits reveal the charm of this story, maybe not, but I find the work to be Steinhauer's best-written, most tightly constructed story.

For more, see the Amazon site, or go to Google Books.

Olen Steinhauer on Spying . . .

Illustration by Nous Vous

Some few years back, I went on a Steinhauer kick and read all of his Eastern European espionage novels, reviewing several of them quite positively -- and getting some response from the man himself. So with my recent acquisition of an iPad and the accompanying ability to access literature instantly, I've begun reading Steinhauer's subsequent 'Tourist' series, in which surveillance is almost omnipresent . . .

Surveillance is, of course, a recurrent theme in contemporary literature -- it even lurks just under the surface of my novella -- and presupposes a world in which nothing is accidental, for the watchers are not merely observing. Given this shared presupposition, along with my recent return to the imagined world of Steinhauer, I found coincidental, but unsurprising, my encounter with an op-ed piece of his published in Bloomberg, a column on the everyday espionage revealed by Edward Snowden's release of classified information on the amount of spying that's going on in the world.

In that piece, "Spying Isn't Stranger Than Fiction" (Bloomberg, November 2, 2013), Steinhauer remarks: "As an espionage novelist, I certainly had an opinion on the matter." As he reveals:

Following that citation of his own words from two months previous, he adds: "Like my fictional persona, I'd already guessed this sort of data-vacuuming was de rigueur." So had I! And I thought, there's an upside and a downside to this. The former? We catch more terrorists. The latter? We catch ourselves with our pants down. Is that a necessary trade-off? I hope not, or we'll have to live with the paranoia of kings wearing no clothes!

As consolation, there's the compliment of what Steinhauer wryly alludes to as the "satellite envy" of those less technologically well endowed . . .

The need for good proofreaders...

36 Yalta Boulevard

C-F 26-1-12-20-1 2-15-21-12-5-22-1-18-4

(Image from olensteinhauer.com)

I'm still reading Olen Steinhauer's Cold War novel 36 Yalta Boulevard, whose 'hero', a character named Brano Sev, is a spy who has fallen from grace with his superiors, the apparatchiks of an unnamed Eastern European communist country aligned with the Soviet Union but pursuing a semi-autonomous path, and who is working to redeem himself with his superiors by faithfully following what he believes to be their intentions for his life in Viennese exile from the socialist paradise.

This could almost be a novel about religion.

Speaking of which, Brano Sev reads the Viennese newspaper Kurier every day, his eye ever alert for the revelation of a message. One day, sitting with his possibly apparatchick girlfriend Dijana Franković at breakfast in her apartment, he receives what he has been waiting for while reading the personal ads:

[H]e reopened the personals. As he did every day, he scanned them quickly, but this time one caught his eye.

Franz F, "Gedicht-1"

Franz F, "Poem-1":

Lieb + Ebenbild sterben in Kampfgas.
Warte ich auf Lawinen? Schlau . . . hab dich!
Acht Jahre! OO Leute, O Reich!

Love + image die in War-gas.
Do I wait for avalanches? Sly . . . gotcha!
Eight years! OO people, O empire.

He didn't understand the poem, and that made sense. This was written not for a surface meaning but for a hidden one, the small grammatical blunder of the first line -- the in instead of im -- helping draw his attention. And the code was simple. Brano looked at the date on the newspaper -- 11 April 1967. 11-4-1967. Poem, minus one. 11-4-1966, or 1-1-4-1-9-6-6.

"You are finding a lover?"

Brano could feel himself reddening. "No," he said. "Just reading poetry."

She smiled, rocking her head as she returned to the world's headlines. "So my Brani like poetry . . ."

Brano got up after a while and, on her bedside table, found a worn pencil. He took it, with the newspaper, to the toliet, closed the door, and began underlining letters based on the code 1-1-4-1-9-6-6 [marked here in bold italics].

Lieb + Ebenbild sterben in Kampfgas.
Warte ich auf Lawinen? Schlau . . . hab dich!
Acht Jahre! OO Leute, O Reich!

L-I-E-B-E-N-G-A-S-T-E-W-C-A-B-D-A-C-O-O

The first part made sense: a meeting place -- Liebengaste WC; the batroom of the Liebengaste, a restaurant north of Mariahilfer, on Neubaugasse. But the rest -- ABDACOO -- did not. Which meant they were numbers. He transformed the letters into numbers, based simply on their alphabetic order, and found 1241300. A date and time -- 12 April, 13:00. (Steinhauer, 36 Yalta Boulevard, 197-198)

At this point in my reading (after first noting that "empire" ought to be followed by an exclamation mark), I stopped, puzzled. Anyone who knows me well enough (and I hope that nobody does) will understand my perplexity whenever faced by puzzles of this sort. Simply put, I'm not very good at solving them, not even those that have been solved for me.

I tried to follow the simple code. I could see that "1-1" meant "Li," but shouldn't "4-1" mean "be" rather than "Eb"? Eventually, I realized that I probably ought to be counting the "+," and that worked -- once I learned to ignore punctuation -- until I reached the first "O," which was only the eighth rather than the ninth letter after the "c" of "Acht." Was I supposed to count the exclamation mark for the "O" to be the ninth letter? An exlamation mark is not a letter, however, and I hadn't been counting punctuation before. Even if I did count punctuation now to reach the "O" after "Jahre!" in nine places, the third "O," the one following "Leute," would be seven letters further instead of six. Finally, it clicked. There was a typo. In the "OO" before "Leute," the second "O" should have been underlined, for it was nine letters after the "c" of "Acht" and six letters before the third "O," i.e., the "O" after "Leute."

But I was still puzzled.

If the letters "ABDACOO" were supposed to be a code for numbers based simply on their alphabetic order, then "ABDAC" would be "12413," but "OO" should be "1515" instead of "00."

I resolved my puzzlement by assuming that Steinhauer, like Homer, sometimes "nodded" and that in a moment of inattention read his letters "OO" (oh oh) as the numbers "00" (zero zero). In other words, he forgot that these were supposed to be in code and read them directly.

Fortunately, Brano Sev made the same error and thus made his rendevous without mishap...

UPDATE: After discussion with Olen Steinhauer (see comments), I realize that I misread "ABDACOO" as a sequence of letters, for I now perceive that the final two items in the sequence were numbers and that the crucial sentence was meant to be read as "He transformed the letters [ABDAC] into numbers." Everything was doubtless clear for all but the slow-witted folks like myself...

When a writer is having fun...

"Genius of the Carpathians"
The Far-Seeing Leader
General Secretary Mihai
. . . er, Ceauşescu
(Image from Wikipedia)

As mentioned yesterday, I have recently received the rest of the novels in Olen Steinhauer's Cold War series on an unnamed Eastern European nation. I've finished reading The Confession and am now reading 36 Yalta Boulevard. I'm not ready to write a long review post yet, for I want to finish them all and think about them, but I do have something to report.

In a passage that expresses perfectly the insipid imagination of the party hack writers who used their literary 'gifts' to extol their party hack leaders, Steinhauer depicts The Funeral Procession for Secretary General Mihai as observed through the watchful eyes of Comrade Inspector Ferenc Kolyeszar:

Children sobbed on fathers' shoulders; mothers clutched their heads whenever anything appeared on the cleared boulevard. Banners fluttered down from windows, announcing that MIHAI LIVES FOREVER IN THE HEARTS OF THE WORKING CLASSES and quoting him: "THE PATH TO FREEDOM IS TREACHEROUS, BUT WE ARE GREATER THAN MERE TREACHERY." His younger portraits hung from lampposts like Roman standards and filled shop windows. Magda grabbed my had as we were pushed forward. The motorcade began with white Militia cars, their aerials bound in black ribbons, then came the long hearse. Madga slipped as the crowd surged, but steadied herself on my arm. Bullhorns on the hearse's roof bellowed a slow dirge and a deep voice listing all his titles: Liberator of the Nation; Friend to the Young and Old; Fount of Imprenetrable Knowledge . . . . Seed of the Land; Thunderstorm in Times of Drought . . . . Academician of Worldwide Acclaim; Friend to the Animals of the Planet . . . . (The Confession, 296-297)

Steinhauer had to have been having fun inventing those titles. Or perhaps Steinhauer simply lifted them from a list of titles for General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party Nicolae Ceauşescu, who gave himself the title "Genius of the Carpathians," among other laudations in his personality cult (though Mihai would have been more of a Gheorghiu-Dej figure).

Ceauşescu, incidentally, may have gotten the idea for such titles from the North Korean titles for the great leaders there, for he visited North Korea in 1971 and was impressed by Kim Il-sung's juche philosophy, which Ceauşescu then attempted to apply in Romania, with predictably disastrous consequences of the sort that we continue to see in North Korea's failures.

Likewise, encountered in person, these great leaders always fail to live up to their great titles, as Steinhauer shows in Jan Soroka's memory of his youthful meeting with the great leader Mihai:

And then I saw Mihai himself . . . . Well, the photos and newsreels never really showed how short he was, did they? He was a head shorter than me. This was a shock, I can tell you . . . . Not just that he was short. He had a cold at the time, and whenever he breathed you could hear how hard it was for him. I was a kid, you know, and I couldn't imagine how such a great man could be like this -- short, snot-nosed, no better than the guy who sells vegetables in the market. And this was the head of our country? (36 Yalta Boulevard, 89-90)

Steinhauer does this bit of demythologization rather convincingly. A short, snotnosed leader who fails to impress up close. Some writer ought also do this with novels on Cold War North Korea.

Or has one already done so? Perhaps I need to read A Corpse in the Koryo by the pseudonymous James Church...

"A Diller, A Dollar"

"A Diller A Dollar"

Excusing my tardiness...

(Image from Museum of Childhood)

I've been away from my blog for over 24 hours, for I had to rush off to Kyung Hee University to pick up a package of books before heading on downtown to a meeting with my friend Myongsob Kim near Seoul Subway's Gwanghwamun Station for a quick bowl of haejangguk (해장국) -- a type of blood soup much loved as a cure for the common Korean hangover -- afterwards sitting with him for much of the afternoon in a nearby smokey cafe, editing a collection of essays on Northeast Asia's politics that Yonsei Press will be publishing very soon.

That cafe was a proper place for such an undertaking, for it was full of still-vigorous old men watching television tuned to political news. At one point, they all gathered closely around the set, intent on some report. I called this to Myongsob's attention. He stopped his editing and looked, then listened carefully. When the old men had again dispersed to their seats and their coffees, he explained that the news had been reporting on the Korean Supreme Court's decision that the investigation being conducted into Myung-bak Lee's role in the BBK scandal has been declared "partly unconstitutional."

"'Partly unconstitutional'?" I echoed. "What does that mean?"

"I don't know," he replied, laughing.

"It sounds like one of those Confucian compromises," I observed.

"Yes," he agreed, "it's a confusing compromise."

I looked at Myongsob, but decided against clarifying the point. He was now listening to the old men, who were discussing what they'd heard. After a while, he told me:

"The old men here know more about politics than I do as a Yonsei professor of political science. They've lived in this area for 40 or 50 years, working in government, and they know everything. They're talking about Lee when he first ran for the National Assembly and when he was Seoul City's mayor. It's fascinating."

Once again, I realized how much I miss out on by not knowing Korean, but I spared no time to dwell on this depressing thought, for we had to return to our last-minute editing, discovering once again the paradox first explored by the presocratic philosopher Zeno as we drew ever nearer to eliminating all errors but always finding yet another. At some point, we had to stop.

"It's a neverending process," I observed, "but we've corrected nearly everything."

Myongsob agreed, and we put away our finished work, drank one more coffee, and headed our separate ways. I took the subway to the Euljiro 1-ga Station (을지로입구역), got off, and headed for an underground restaurant that calls itself Carnestation to meet Gord Sellar and Charles La Shure for dinner and drinks.

I reached the place an hour ahead of time, so I looked around the underground area and found a nearby cafe serving good coffee, settled into a booth there, and finally looked at the books that I'd received that morning. Over a year ago, I blogged about Olen Steinhauer's fascinating first novel, The Bridge of Sighs. Ever since then, I've been meaning to read the entire series, a fascinating set of stories that combine elements of detective fiction, the spy novel, and the political thriller and that are set in an unnamed Eastern European country spanning its Cold War history from the end of World War 2 until the fall of Communism. I've only managed to get started on these novels, so I'll keep silent for the moment but return to them in a future blog entry after I've read them all and have something worthwhile to say.

The rest of the evening went by in a blur. I recall eating, drinking, and talking with Gord and Charles about a number of fascinating topics, and I seem to recall a lot of laughter, but my thoughts are a bit scattered, and I could use a dish of haejangguk about right now, so perhaps I'd better stop now and watch the snow falling outside my window.

Speaking of snow falls, you might remember this Snow Fall haiku...

Threatened with success!

Olen Steinhauer

Opting for overwhelming success?

(Image from Contemporary Nomad)

No, not I, though yesterday was my 1000th blog entry -- possibly a valid measure for some sort of success, I suppose.

No, the person threatened with overwhelming success is my online acquaintance and blogger Olen Steinhauer, about whose Cold War detective fiction, I've previously written, for example, his Bridge of Sighs:

The novel has some excellent moments in which Steinhauer evokes moods that one expects more from an older writer ... as in this scene from Brod's earlier, wartime escape working with an international crew of misfits fishing the North Sea:

They were all sweating from the heat of the boiler room next door, and there were too many of them, sprawled on the floor and the table, the wind hissing over the deck above them.

The Croat described the walk from his friend's palazzo to a canal that was overlooked, high up, by a covered bridge that connected two stone walls. The doomed, he told them. They crossed here on the way to the prisons. They call it the Bridge of Sighs. The Arab asked why. Because the prisoner had been convicted, and this was where he saw that, at the end of that short walk across the bridge, his life would be lived behind a stone wall. Behind iron bars. He would live and die in the dark.

A bleak silence fell over the cabin. No one spoke. Each man remembered his own bridge, but Emil, still so young, only knew he was missing the power of the moment, and said nothing.

Those of us who have reached a 'certain' age understand this moment implicitly, and I can't help but think of Marianne Faithfull singing the old Dubin-Warren piece from 1934, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," which I think was played for me in Fribourg, Switzerland by my friend Tim Anderson around Christmas 1989, when Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu fell from power. We didn't cry for Ceauşescu, but the shattered dreams of all those wasted Eastern European decades saddened us:

I walk along the street of sorrow
The boulevard of broken dreams
Where gigolo and gigolette
Can take a kiss without regret
So they forget their broken dreams.

After a certain age, who doesn't have a few dreams broken...

Olen, however, can now begin to dream big, for from his literary agent, Stephanie Cabot, he has some wonderful news:

Stephanie was the bringer of news: Warner Bros would be optioning The Tourist, with the plan for it to involve…George Clooney....

Clooney and Grant Heslov have optioned the film via their Smoke House production company. Who stars, I guess, is up to them.

Now, this is only an option on Olen's recently-finished-but-not-yet-published-novel, The Tourist, and time alone will tell whether or not a movie gets made, but if this option does lead to a film, then Olen's readership will expand exponentially, and deservedly so.

A hearty congratulation to Olen on his potential success, and for the other good news from his hardworking literary agent, Stephanie Cabot, who likewise deserves appreciation for her successful efforts on Olen's behalf.