Sympathy for the Spy

...Whatever life there is in these pages gradually suffocates under the weight of Bernstein's knowing, mannered and cautious presentation...

...Like all historical novels, Conspirators lays bare the prejudices of the age in which it was written as much as those of the time in which it is set...

...Although the sentiment could also apply to Europe on the verge of World War I, the phrase "history is written by the winners" belongs to the academic radicals of the 1960s...

...Instead of descriptive scenes, he builds Conspirators through a series of interviews and imbricated recollections...

...A sect of Messianic Jews...

...The great 19th-century novels often dashed their youthful heroes against the stern rocks of a social order that was either impersonal or represented by incompetents...

...Of late he has argued strenuously against the influence of what he calls "apocalyptic history"—the notion of a predetermined and knowable outcome to history that individuals can help bring about, be it world revolution or the coming of the Messiah...

...The initial report is given directly in quotation marks, the second reflects the ministry's attitude in indirect free style...

...Tausk talks to his boss, Count Wiladowski...

...He is recognized by onetime informer Alexander Garber, a playwright and novelist, and by Alicia Chudo, a Russian emigre Tausk had tortured...

...Bernstein, however, forgets or chooses to ignore a basic but important aspect of the novel of ideas: pacing...

...The stagehands and understudies are taking over politics, and in the end that always means more bloodshed...

...Bernstein has clearly learned from him, just as he takes from Dostoyevsky's Demons the lesson that modern political novels must deal with the way intelligence is transmitted, received and processed as opinions...

...Crucial moments are relayed in flat chatter...

...People dance, flirt, shoot, escape from prisons, have affairs, even discover art or God or love...

...And Tausk, then working for the region's Austrian monarchist governor, was he involved too...

...Since they know so much about themselves and each other, the reader has nothing to do but be stupefied or take assiduous mental dictation...

...In keeping with that interest, Conspirators attempts to deploy the historical novel against the traditional conceits that once animated such works: obsession with a great lost cause, or the pursuit of happiness, or the more obscure feelings of naïveté, boredom and loathing that pushed Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, Stendhal's Julien Sorel and Dostoyevsky's Stavrogin to behave recklessly and cause harm...

...You both believe in power as something wonderful in itself, you both would sacrifice anything including yourselves to hold on to it, and secretly, you both take someone like me, who no longer feels the same way, for a fool...

...To revisit such hallowed ground, not only in form but also in subject matter, and to emerge unhaunted by its ghosts, demands a supremely gifted novelist...

...Reviewed by Marco Roth Department of Comparative Literature, Yale University The author of this first novel, a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California's Berkeley campus, has a distinguished body of criticism to his name...

...These days whoever has the loudest grievance wants to write the next chapter...

...Conspirators explicitly deals with the methods of police states, but nothing here approaches the force of the opening scene of The Trial in conveying what it was like to be arrested without charge under the Hapsburgs...

...Stendhal was the first author to use the wandering narrator to create an effect of constant irony, destabilizing the reader's reactions to his eccentric characters...

...Tausk's cigarette smoking is the only activity evoked with any gusto...

...Always in quest of more knowledge, the characters load every sentence they speak with too much of it...

...The characters are heard reflecting at one remove from the action, sometimes two or three...

...Time shifts by decades within a single paragraph...

...It is a selfconscious anachronism, and it shows where Bernstein's true concerns lie...

...Unfortunately, Bernstein's talents as a fiction writer do not quite match his ambitions...

...Bernstein's uneven use of complex narrative techniques does keep a reader on his toes...

...The sudden switch turns an already complex political thriller into a disorganized series of explorations into the relationships between fathers and sons, Jews and gentiles, aristocrats and the middle class...

...Here the wit of Conspirators breaks through at last in a clever reversal—making the competent, intelligent, worldly authorities into the victims of callow youths...

...The question could be applied to Conspirators as a whole...

...Here is Wiladowski explaining to Tausk why he switched from yeshiva student to spy: "No matter what you tell me, I know you did not become a spy only for the pay, any more than my uncle became a cardinal because of the cuisine in Rome...

...We feel the missed opportunity for a European order where Jews would have remained a tolerated and thriving minority within a harmonious multiethnic empire...

...Rotenburg interviews the Messianic Rabbi Brugger and is himself exposed...

...Together, the two begin to spy on the spy and inquire about who was responsible for the assassinations of several Austrian aristocrats in a small, unnamed Galician town in 1913...

...Conversation can feed and animate a novel, but the conversations in this one are not dialogues or even soliloquies so much as series of digressions and set pieces intended to reveal the climate of opinion in the declining Austro-Hungarian Empire...

...Summoned to a meeting with the Jewish financier Moritz Rotenburg—a humanized caricature of the anti-Semitic stereotype of the capitalist as omniscient spider—the spymaster Tausk asks himself, "How could Rotenburg have amassed so much information only to have it yield such imprecise results...

...Even so, the maneuver would have been more effective had Bernstein been able to render these entanglements more dynamically...

...Bernstein sets his version of the classic, if now little-used, genre in one of modern Europe's most sophisticated societies, the waning Austro-Hungarian Empire—familiar to readers of Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, and many others...

...Wiladowski is a provincial governor of a vast but dwindling empire, attempting to guard homeland security, as well as his own life, from terrorists...

...They have a sensual existence...

...Information accumulates, but we never seem to get anywhere...

...We learn about his taste for pornography and the unfortunate incident that gives rise to his rational fear of assassination...

...The book begins intriguingly enough: Jakob Tausk, a former brilliant rabbinical student turned spy, resurfaces in Austria in 1925 as amember of Lenin's Cheka...

...In 19th-century novels things happen quickly...

...We witness the gradual unraveling of his anti-Semitism as he comes to respect the intellectual gifts of his master spy...

...Wiladowski talks to himself...

...points of view also vary, sometimes within a single sentence: "Since [Moritz Rotenburg's son] Hans had been known as a passionate Zionist back in his high school days, when several of his teachers secretly reported him to the government for exhibiting 'the divided loyalties typical of his race,' some elements in the ministry continued to regard him as a potentially important figure in the outlandish Jewish fantasy of leading the Hebrew people back to their Promised Land...

...Despite all the screens, certain statements resound with particular convictions belonging to the author or our era...

...Bernstein's relentless, long-winded expositions read like a detective story written by a wooden Marcel Proust—a Proust without the breathless enthusiasm, the subtlety, or the eye for distinguishing critical details...

...Had he lived, Wiladowski might have saved Austria...

...Anarchists...

...Bernstein is less interested in the mystery itself, though, than in the psychology of his characters...

...Was it Communists...

...Tausk and Wiladowski talk again...

...He would surely make a great President of the United States...

...They are oppressed by the author's need to explicate the history they are living out in all of its details...

...Count Wiladowski believes that "The person who said history was written by the winners was a fool...

...Bernstein wants us to feel pity and sympathy for the grand inquisitors of history, the spies and the masters who use them to keep other human beings from creating violence and disorder...

...As Conspirators plods toward its climactic murders, Wiladowski emerges as its tragic hero and the narrative spends more time in his company...

...He proceeds to abandon the investigation being presented from Garber's point of view in favor of a torturous account of the murders, the fate of the wealthy Rotenburg family, and of Tausk from the perspectives of various figures involved...

...Stendhal dispenses with the battle of Waterloo in fewer words than it takes Bernstein to describe a lunch between minor players...