Pavel & I

September 24, 2007
Set during the frigid Berlin winter of 1946, Vyleta's wily debut follows the exploits of an American GI, a German street urchin and an enigmatic prostitute as they struggle to survive both the cold and the looming Cold War. Pavel Richter, an American soldier who remained in Berlin after the war, is shocked when his friend Boyd White shows up at his door with a dead German midget. After agreeing to help Boyd hide the body, Pavel and his friend Anders are thrust into the middle of a conspiracy that runs deeper than they could ever imagine. Boyd soon turns up dead, and Pavel and Anders discover that the midget, Söldmann, was a spy for the occupying Russians and was set to deliver a mysterious package on the night of his death. Boyd's and Söldmann's deaths arouse the interest of Pavel's upstairs neighbors, the nefarious British Colonel Fosko and his prostitute companion, Sonia, who join the Russians and Germans in the hunt for Söldmann's lost loot, and Pavel finds himself falling in love with Sonia. Despite an overabundance of minor characters and a conclusion that isn't exactly surprising, Vyleta conjures a convincing postwar Berlin in all of its moral ambiguity.

December 15, 2007
The son of Czech refugees who immigrated to Germany in the late 1960s, Berlin-based Vyleta sets his debut in Berlin in the terrible winter of 194647. His narrator Petersen, the "I" of the title, is a freelance torturer for an obese British colonel named Fosko. When an American grifter dumps the body of a dead midget on Pavel Richter and is killed soon after, Pavel attracts the attention of the colonel. Apparently, the midget was a spy for General Karpov of the Soviet NKVD (secret police) and had in his possession "merchandise" of interest to all. But just who is Pavel? He appears to be simply an ex-GI, an American who abandoned his wife in the States and lives in squalid conditions with Anders, a 12-year-old orphan. Pavel, a quiet scholar at heart, and Anders are soon forced to turn for help to Sonia, a prostitute who has just moved in upstairs. In the midst of these entangled lives and against a noirish backdrop of starvation and ghastly cold lies many a mystery. But the mysteries themselvesand the details of plotare far less interesting than the characters, whose unusual lives are explored with masterful depth. Recommended for larger public libraries.Ron Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tuscon

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