Campaign for the American Reader: Pg. 69: "Liberation Movements"

Olen Steinhauer is the author of an acclaimed five-novel series chronicling Cold War Eastern Europe.

Liberation Movements, the fourth volume in the series, was published in 2006. Olen was kind enough to put his novel to the "page 69 test." Here is what he found:

Liberation Movements follows five different stories that take place from 1968 to 1975, in both Eastern Europe and Istanbul. One aim was to show how they connect and reconnect, having unpredictable repercussions on one another. So when I looked for page 69, I had no idea whose tale I’d end up staring at.

It turns out that page 69 plays out in the Obecní Dům—the Municipal House—a cavernous, gilded café in the center of Prague, in 1968, just days after the end of the Prague Spring. Nowadays, the café has a kind of quaint touristy glamour, but during the sixties, it was haunted largely by communist bureaucrats.

A conversation is ending between one of the main characters, Peter Husák, and an intimidating officer who recently interrogated him in a stone cell, Captain Poborsky. The captain is trying to convince Peter to spy against his democratic friends.

During his argument, the captain states one central theme of the book:

“You know, I'm told all the time that everything is political. Man, our socialist teachers explain, is a political animal, and, in fact, the personal is the political. But between you and me, I've never believed that. The political, in fact, is really only the personal dressed up in more flamboyant clothes. There is no political man, only men, whose politics grow from their personal traumas. You follow me?”

Despite the impression this excerpt may give, the book isn’t actually full of philosophizing. There’s sex, murder, airplane terrorism, a few laughs, revenge, and ESP. Also, plenty of lengthy sideburns. Kinda like life.

And while Peter’s story is only a small part of Liberation Movements, it reflects and coerces the other tales that take place seven years later. We watch as a young man lacking clear convictions turns gradually to immorality and, by 1975, to real evil.

Many thanks to Olen for the input.

Read a Chapter One excerpt and a longer excerpt.

Liberation Movements made the 2006 Best-of Lists at the Chicago Tribune, January Magazine, The National Review, and Critical Mass.

It is a finalist for the 2007 Edgar Award for Best Novel of the Year.

Among the praise for the novel:

I'm not sure exactly what first prompted American novelist Olen Steinhauer to use the crime fiction form to tell the story of the rise and fall of Communist ideology in an unnamed Eastern European country [...] Whatever the reason, it was an inspired choice--giving history and politics a chance to simmer over the flame of murder. [...] Steinhauer's first three books caught the frustration and bleakness of their Eastern European setting to heartbreaking perfection. He underscores those qualities this time with contrasting scenes of a Turkish capital bursting with life and some semblance of hope. And the irony which has colored the series to such strong effect is even more evident in "Liberation Movements." [...This is a] most important series.
--Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune

"Liberation Movements...should put Steinhauer squarely in the front of the pack of today's espionage writers."
--Paula Woods, LA Times

Steinhauer's elegant spy novel Liberation Movements is imbued with a retro kind of cool. [...] It is a tight, neatly structured story, built around the lives of very Cold War characters, individuals effaced by the secrecy of their professions and the cynicism of their nation. But Liberation Movements is not so cold or so neat, for all that. At its heart is a messy, human revenge plot that is as captivating as it is unlikely to end happily.
--Anna Godbersen, Esquire