THE HOUSE OF SPARK

In LaFlash’s debut novel, a college student searches for her missing boyfriend in Communist Romania.

In 1957 Bucharest, medical student Virginia Gemanar has been dating her boyfriend, Jenica Cureteanu, for a year. They’ve always talked about going to see a concert at the city’s Athenaeum, and when Jenica calls to tell Virginia he’s scored tickets, she’s filled with excitement. When she goes to meet him the next day at a statue by the concert hall, however, he doesn’t show. She spends the rest of the day hanging out at the apartment of her friends Mircea and Doina, hoping that Jenica will appear. It doesn’t make sense for Jenica to have vanished—he isn’t connected to any criminals or anyone the police might consider subversive—but Virginia is still afraid to go to the authorities; ever since Romania joined the Warsaw Pact a few years earlier, the country has been run as a police state. “Jenica’s unexpected disappearance kept [Virginia] awake and wondering….The question so tormented her that she started thinking the worst, even the possibility that he might have been abducted and killed and that she would never see him again.” The next morning, Virginia heads to Jenica’s dorm to discover that several books are missing, and under his bed, she finds a suitcase filled with moldy notebooks. Strangest of all, the only person who claims to have seen Jenica recently—an ex-roommate—is behaving strangely and sporting a mysterious bruise. With no one to rely on except a few trusted pals, Virginia is forced to play the role of detective, sifting through clues and rumors to figure out just where Jenica went and if it’s possible to bring him back.

LaFlash, who grew up in Romania, immigrated to the United States in 1997 after the fall of Communism, and although her prose comes off as slightly awkward at times, it consistently reveals her deep knowledge of life in Bucharest under the Securitate, with plenty of specific detail: “Virginia’s heart sank. Almost everyone in Bucharest knew that the Jilava Penitentiary was one of the country’s largest and most dreaded….The army later converted it into a site for preventative and posttrial imprisonment for males who had been accused and found guilty of political crimes.” Over the course of the novel, one will find plenty of similarly expositional moments, which give the work as a whole a slightly didactic quality, as if the entire purpose of the plot were merely to dramatize this particular period in Romanian history. As a result, many of the characters in this narrative feel thinly drawn, and they reflect less moral ambiguity than readers might be expecting to find in people living under such difficult circumstances. Even so, the story’s mystery elements keep the plot consistently moving forward, and the reader will be just as anxious as Virginia to discover the fate of her missing boyfriend as her search takes her into a dangerous subterranean world of dissidents and secret police.

A sometimes-dense but informative novel set in Communist Bucharest.