The Woman from Bratislava

This is a Danish thriller about spies, the influence of history and family ties. Set during the early days of NATO bombing of Serbia, Leif Davidsen explores the history of Nazism in Denmark and the more recent history of the Cold War, when Denmark's location on the Baltic Sea gave it strategic importance.

Teddy is a university lecturer whose dissertation concluding that the Soviet Union would remain strong for the foreseeable future came out early enough to get him his current position, but too late for him to have become a full professor before his field of study became obsolete. He frequently joins groups traveling through eastern Europe, and it's on one of those tours that he's visited by a Yugoslavian woman who claims to be his show more half-sister. Meanwhile, his other sister is arrested when the opening of Stasi files indicates that she is the Danish spy, formerly known only as Edelweiss, who had passed important state secrets to the Soviet Union. The police officer assigned to find out who fed her the information is sent all over eastern Europe, from Prague to Budapest to the Albania port city of Durrës, as he seeks to find the woman who claimed to be Teddy's sister, and who seems to hold the key to all the secrets.

Spy thrillers are not really my thing, but the novel did a fantastic job of illuminating a time and place that I know less than I should about. From the Danish history of having troops fighting on the side of the Germans during WWII, until the war was lost and those same men who had fought in the SS were vilified and imprisoned when they returned home, to those chaotic days when formerly communist countries became capitalist overnight, to the disintegration of Yugoslavia, this book was full of historical events I know little or nothing about.

The translation was iffy, and seemed to have been either done in a rush, or by someone with less than complete fluency in English. Eye shadow sets off the color of a woman's iris, for example, and clothing is referred to as "self-colored" more than once. Still, I was happy to have a less than stellar translation than none at all. show less

Started slowly and I almost gave up, then it picked up pace in the middle and faded away again towards the end. The plot revolves around a Danish family whose father was a Nazi supporter and fought for them in the Balkans and eastern front. The daughter is suspected of being a long-standing GDR agent and an intelligence officer tries to prove her guilt. Hard work, although it does shine a light on a little known aspect of Danish history during WWII.

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signeret:
"Med venlig hilsen
Leif Davidsen"