Reviews for Reuven Shiloah - the Man behind the Mossad

The average rating for Reuven Shiloah - the Man behind the Mossad based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-08-07 00:00:00 Peter Clay "You can convince yourself of all sorts of things" When a friend pushed a copy of "Pavel and I" on me and told me to read it, I had no idea what I was in for. This text is not what I anticipated and it exceeded any expectations I had for it. "Pavel and I" takes place in postwar Berlin in the winter of 1946/47. The frigid setting is vividly rendered. The book itself seems cold to the touch. It is a literary thriller, but that seems an inadequate descriptor. This was my first book by Dan Vyleta, but it will not be my last. "Pavel and I" was Vyleta's first novel, and it is a remarkable debut. His writing is unique in style, thoughtful in content, and clever in its plotting and presentation. The novel is heavily influenced by Dickens and Dostoevsky (according to the author's afterward) and Vyleta's clever use of the narrator in this text is well executed. The novel's enigmatic protagonist will leave you with questions. I'll let you unravel that for yourself, go read it, rather than me pontificate on it. Here are some moments/quotes in the text that I really enjoyed: "Pavel suffered from that terminal disease called empathy, forever trying to exchange points of view even with the boot that kicked him." "…his tongue kept tripping over the edge of words…" "I have often noticed that the past adds a sense of clarity to affect; in the present, one too often strains to feel anything much at all." "Unsure whether to be touched by her bout of sentimentality, or see it as but another symptom of a life so very barren of tenderness, one had to invent emotion, against all the evidence." "You imagine it: a storyteller locked out of his own tale. It turns one into a historian, that retrospective scrounger of fact. I cannot think of a more sordid occupation." "Against this rich canvas of history, my prime interest, of course, lay with the life paths that had so recently intersected with my own." "The thing is, when does one ever get to do that? To talk of the essential things, all those thoughts and experiences a man shuts up in his chest and gags on for half his life? They don't spill out but once or twice in a lifetime- and very often not at all." "You can convince yourself of all sorts of things." "Pavel and I" is a well written novel, a good story, a skillfully and uniquely told tale. There is more to it than meets the eye. I love when a book swoops in out of nowhere and does that to me. I am excited to read more of Mr. Vyleta's books.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-05-07 00:00:00 Alex Vanhecke I am long of frame and grumpy of disposition. Thus, when wedged into a bus seat during the inevitable holiday trip to the family, I find a well-done novel set during the grimmest moments of modern history really hits the spot because such a novel of this type can be both diverting and can pointedly remind that, however long and congested the New Jersey turnpike seems to be, it is not nearly as bad as European capitals were immediately after World War II. So this year I read City of Thieves (set in Leningrad) on the way towards the ancestral homestead; this novel (Berlin) passed the time very satisfactorily on the way back. The novels starts a bit of the busy side, what with the swift introduction of a dead mobster-spy-dwarf in a steamer trunk, a gang of feral youth, a pet monkey, and sundry intelligence operatives and prostitutes, shoved onstage pretty quickly to get your attention focused. But soon things settle down a little and we're off on a nicely-plotted adventure in search, eventually, of the inevitable microfilm. I read somewhere that, if a playwright mentions a gun in the first act, it has to go off in the last act. The monkey served that purpose here. In the last act, the monkey goes off, metaphorically speaking. There's some nice post-modern writerly tricks in here too, including shuffling time back and forth and starting with a narrator who seems at first third-person omniscient but in the end turns out to be a character in the story. Worth a read if a grim story is your thing. Of course, it's not really any grimmer than holidays with the family.