Don Quixote in Exile

by Peter Furst

Peter Furst's biographical novel is the chronicle of a Jew who fled Germany in the 1930s.

The odyssey begins in Monte Carlo, where a narrator named Peter is covering the auto races for a German newspaper. Preferring life as an exile over a return to Nazi Germany, Peter bounces to Madrid, where he's branded a Nazi; covers the Spanish Civil War from the back room of a Vienna coffeehouse; and journeys to Belgrade, where all the cafe patrons without dark glasses are assumed to be spies. His final journey, however, is far from droll or he and his new bride must desperately search the Caribbean for a country that will allow them entry.

Genres: Fiction

209 pages, Hardcover

First published June 3, 1996

Reviews

[Paul Cornelius · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peter Furst, the protagonist of the story, is Peter Furst, the author, who penned this autobiographical novel. I see from the blurb on the back of the book that its marketers think it an episodic story. I suppose that comes from the title, and the allusion to Don Quixote. But Don Quixote in Exile is not episodic. It's fragmentary. It does begin with vignettes, somewhat of the type in Maugham's The Gentleman in the Parlour, essentially a travel book of encounters from Burma to Bangkok and on to Indochina. And Don Quixote in Exile has that same feel. But Furst does more. His fragments present themselves elliptically, leaving imagination to take root and complete the tale at many points.

Still, there is uncertainty on every page. You never forget that Peter is a refugee. A German Christian with Jewish grandparents who is fleeing Hitler's Germany and its conquests. In a way, he is a "converso," akin to the alleged family history of Columbus, which is brought up throughout the stay in Hispaniola.

Then, there are the individuals Peter, along with his wife, Gretl, encounter. They make for enticing descriptions, with their stories and background. Sometimes, you wish the novel would veer off and follow them into their worlds. Furst does a remarkable job in building atmosphere, after the disembarkation in the Dominican Republic, around these characters. As Peter's employer remarks on the last page, before Peter leaves for the United States, "Make this world here your past. It will feed your soul until the end of your days." Furst published this, which I believe to be his only novel, in 1996. A couple of years before he died. His days adrift did pursue him until the end.