4 out of 5

I will eagerly remark to all non-fiction readers that I don’t like non-fiction.  I’ll look down my nose at their autobiographies and Oprah-of-the-week feel-good tales; I’ll twirl my mustache and chortle over their inability to appreciate whatever nonsense fiction I’m reading.

‘Truth is stranger than fiction!’ is a common retort, to which I’ll remind that truth has no care for the structures that can make fiction compelling: beginnings, middles, ends, heroic cycles, climaxes, etcetera.  Our lives – our REAL, FASCINATING STORIES – have no exact beginnings or ends, and if you start from logical ones (for a person: birth and death), there’s so much unimportant nonsense to recount inbetween that has minimal impact on whatever singular piece you really want to focus on…  And truth can be strange, but it’s always bound by, like, being the truth.  You can only go so far with it.

None of this stuff will sway y’all from loving your non-fiction, of course; equally, I’m unlikely to alter my haughty judgements on the genre anytime soon.

Of course, there are always the existence of certain things that thumb their respective noses at me in defiance of my feelings, such as Julian Rubenstein’s non-fiction recollection of Hungarian Attila Ambrus,  serial robber, and topic of ‘Ballad of the Whiskey Robber.’

Lowering my defenses – a tad – there have been occasional non-fictions I’ve enjoyed, and I find they share some things in common, which are also present in Whiskey Robber: a focused narrative, and a style and tone which almost could be fiction.  Ambrus’ escape from jail in Romania, preceding his sneaking into Hungary, is as far back as we need to go (in detail) to get the gist of the world and lifestyle that allowed for his eventual 20+ robbery stint; his eventual imprisonment for those crimes is as far into the present as-is needed as well.  Rubenstein is sure to give us timely information regarding the political landscape (in Hungary, and the influences coming from America, as well), and dots his tale with notes from Attila’s background, but it’s always presented as it becomes relevant to the story, and not just as an exhaustive info dump.  The tone, also, is conversational, and embraces the outlandishness of what happened, with Rubeinstein clearly respectful of Ambrus as a person, but by no means glossing over – nor wallowing in – the lower points of his history.  The book is generally to the point but informative, while not forgetting to put an entertaining polish on things all the same.

Attila’s penniless career as a janitor-turned-kinda-sorta-hockey-player eventually led him to pelt smuggling, eventually led him to travel agency / bank robbing.  Hungary’s underfunded police couldn’t keep up with what turned out to be rather well-plotted crimes (despite Ambrus getting massively drunk before each one), and ‘The Whiskey Robber’ was soon earning public favor due to his gentlemanly behavior during the heists, becoming a Robin Hood-type figure, despite Attila not really giving back to the poor.  (…Except that he would always make himself poor, spending his earnings on casinos and trips for a string of girlfriends.)  While this might sound like a fairly normal “man turns to crime” story, it’s the extent to which his career is allowed to grow – near misses on arrests, further escapes from jail – that add a nigh-‘fictional’ spark to it.

If there is a mark of non-fiction remaining, it’s in that we can never really know the people involved.  Rubenstein, though an Ambrus fan, steps back from a more jovial tone the further we progress in to the story, as though holding back on his appreciation a tad so as not to seem bias.  And this isn’t an omniscient narrator: it’s a reporter, reporting facts.  So we’re not given access to Attila’s thoughts, and we can only dip into the supporting characters as far as they were involved, which is almost always peripherally.  So, while I can also say that I came out of this thinking of Attila as a generally good guy, I never really felt for him or “know” him the way I would / could with a fiction book’s lead.  And I remarked on the appreciated focus of what’s covered, but there’s still downtime: lulls between robberies during which a novel might layer in some supportive world-building stuff, but in reality, remains just a lull.  These rinse and repeat cycles of rob-worry-get-poor-and-rob-again definitely happen a few times in the book, and Rubenstein juggles it mostly successfully by talking about the police, or the state of things in Hungary, but, to a certain extent, the “wait” is unavoidable.

But I finished the book, didn’t I?  A non-fiction book.  A book that I might willfully recommend to others, and one that would actually – I think – have pretty wide appeal!  It is an insane story, and while maybe not “stranger than fiction,” it’s maybe proof, to my doubting self, that anything can be interesting if presented in a certain fashion.