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TRAIN TO TRIESTE

Name: TRAIN TO TRIESTE
Author: Domnica Radulescu
ISBN: 978-0-307-26823-5

by Domnica Radulescu ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 5, 2008

A pleasantly suspenseful narrative delivered in competent but unnuanced English.

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In this fictionalized memoir from the Romanian author and professor, a Romanian refugee flees the Ceausescu regime and becomes a professor of languages and theater in America.

Mona comes from a long line of strong Romanian women, beginning with her great-grandmother, who floats down a flood-swollen river and marries her rescuer. At 17, Mona meets the love of her life, raven-haired, green-eyed Mihai, while vacationing in the Carpathian Mountains. Mercurial Mihai’s last girlfriend was killed (accidentally, or perhaps not) by a rock kicked loose by Mihai while the two were hiking in the foothills. Between trysts with Mihai, Mona observes the contradictions of life under the Ceausescus—the dictator tag team of Nicolae and Elena. Public education is excellent—Mona’s high school has imparted a firm grounding in languages, comparative literature and classical music. However, the food shortages, empty store shelves and long lines plaguing so many Cold War-era eastern bloc countries oppress Romanians, including Mona’s linguistics professor father and poet mother, almost as much as constant surveillance by the Securitate (secret police) who slouch menacingly in the shadows of city streets and cafés. As the Securitate net tightens around Mona’s father, a member of a dissident group, her parents resolve to get her out. This will entail leaving Mihai, who lately has been spouting Party lines with unaccustomed fervor. Escaping via Yugoslavia into Italy, she’s sheltered by two Italian families who aid her passage to America. The section set in America is perforce less gripping than the Romanian scenes, and Radulescu glosses over her protagonist’s troubled marriage to an American psychologist, as well as the ensuing divorce and child-custody wrangling. After Mona’s parents join her in America they have the satisfaction of watching Ceausescu’s fall (and Christmas Day impromptu execution) on television. An immigrant cousin informs Mona of Mihai’s death. Finally, 40-something Mona makes her way home for a long overdue investigation of Mihai’s true character.

A pleasantly suspenseful narrative delivered in competent but unnuanced English.

Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-307-26823-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.