Dolores Pala was born and grew up in New York. She first went to Paris at the age of twenty where she still lives. She worked with the United Nations and with an organization dealing with exiles from Central Europe during the icy early years of the Cold War from which she derived the colorful, taut atmosphere of Vienna that is the background to Run A Hollow Road. She describes young Americans abroad then, so different from Hemingway's characters, in a Europe dangerously torn by conflicting ideologies, a long way from the Charleston. And she shows how the fifties bore little resemblance to the twenties. Yet the young Americans abroad she introduces us to are endearing, even flamboyant, enjoying the freedom of Europe, bent on fulfilling themselves no matter what the social climate of the times. Each in his own way and in radically different voices, introduce us to a yesterday we have almost forgotten and an innocence barely lost.
Run a Hollow Road is her third novel. It takes place in Vienna and spans a decade of international intrigue and contending ideologies at a nerve center in our divided world. The characters are young and American, the background is old and very European. It is a novel of contrasts, tenderness and tension, commitment and elusiveness. It introduces us to lifesized characters and a few who prove to be outsized and everlasting. It is a portrait of a period and after reading it we are enriched.
