When Alan Furst's The Spies of Warsaw came out I read it with great interest, the way I read almost everything written about the city in which I lived and worked for two and a half years.
I hadn't read Furst before (most of my reading is of nonfiction) and I was disappointed to find the novel formulaic and his descriptions of Warsaw rather rudimentary. Also, the main character, the one who clearly occupied the author's affections, was a French military attache.
Before Furst came to Books & Books for a reading I called his publisher and set up an interview. (I was then working for the Sun-Sentinel.) I took along a copy of my book, Unquiet Days, which contains what I suspect is the longest description in English of post-war Warsaw.
Before his reading we chatted in the store courtyard. It soon became clear that Furst had very little interest in Warsaw. He had spent only a couple of weeks there doing research; I got the feeling that for him it was nothing more than an evocative setting for the latest in his series of World War II novels. Nevertheless, I gave him my book, but I didn't give him the short list of corrections for the paperback edition of his. (For instance: the singular of paczki is paczek.)
So imagine my surprise yesterday when I picked up the New York Times Travel section and saw that the cover story was a look at the Polish capital through the pages of The Spies of Warsaw on the occasion of the publication of the paperback.
Pilsudski Square, mentioned in the article, is where in June of 1979 I attended the Mass said by Pope John Paul II on his first historic return to his homeland, an event that many believe led to the formation of Solidarity and the eventual fall of the Berlin Wall. On that same square, back then called Victory Square, I attended the funeral of Cardinal Wyszynski in May of 1981, witnessing a procession of clergy and foreign dignitaries the likes of which I shall never see again. In December of that year I roamed the frigid streets the first week of martial law and saw Polish soldiers rounding up striking students. Eight months later I headed off with thousands of Varsovians on the pilgrimage to Czestochowa as city workers lined the streets to wish us Godspeed and give us meaningful looks and flash us the V sign. I stood in queues in Ochota and rummaged through secondhand bookshops in Centrum and drank vodka in cramped apartments in Stegny. But I didn't write a novel featuring a French military attache.
