Domnica RadulescuRecensioni

Wow. So beautifully and emotionally written. Filled with gorgeous metaphors and imagery, has a wonderful writing style that portrays Mona's voice wonderfully. Was not quite convinced of the romance between Mihai and Mona at the start of the book, but it grew on me over the course of the story. Also, I felt that perhaps Mona had one too many symbolic dreams, or that at times the metaphoric imagery was over-used, however, I feel like this gave me a really good insight into Romania in this time and place, including the culture and the importance of family, language and good food. Very very moving.

L'exil dans l'exil... La mémoire tronquée d'un pays truqué... Très beau livre, boiteux½

In the middle of her long, incense-soaked wedding ceremony, Lara Kulicz amuses herself by creating a philosopher's alphabet, assigning a name to each letter of the alphabet, identifying X for Xenophon just when the priest declares the couple "man and wife".

In much the same way, Domnia Radulescu incorporates light-hearted elements and subplots which offer readers relief from the novel's central theme - the devastating effects of the 1982 Bosnian War.

As with Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, a friendship is a key component of the novel, and this is a friendship viewed from a distance too. Their friendship - like every other aspect of their lives - is fundamentally shaped by the genocidal war surrounding them, and readers are preoccupied more with the absences of the women in each other's lives than their presences, more with their feelings of separation and alienation than union and intimacy.

Katja Rudolph’s Little Bastards in Springtime would make a great reading companion, exploring the aftermath of this conflict from the perspective of a young man, Jevrem, who also survives the conflict, but is forced to draw and redraw his own borders in the aftermath.

“We call ourselves The Bastards of Yugoslavia, as a joke. We like the word bastard. It’s got a ring to it, and has a lot of different meanings. It’s what the nationalists who took over our country called us, the offspring of women in mixed marriages. They meant it as an insult, but we feel proud. It’s why we’re here, together, in this flat, endless city next to an abnormally large lake. They didn’t want us back home, not really, in all their new separate little cleaned-up countries, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro, Macedonia. And Bosnia, split completely in half, Croats and Muslims on one side, Serbs on the other. Where were we beautiful mongrels meant to fit?”

There are many Bastards of Yugoslavia, beautiful mongrels, whose stories have not been told, but Domnica Radulescu's Country of Red Azaleas brings forth one such story.

Both Lara and Marija are untethered. One of them is ostensibly more protected, able to ruminate on this sense of dislocation: "We spoke Serbian again and the many consonants of my native language soothed my burning mouth, my parched throat, my devastated soul. I need a break from English, from America, from idiomatic expressions and mannerisms." The other is more overtly vulnerable, in the thick of the conflict: "But a boot kicking you in your stomach is always real and you can’t mistake it for not real. And you can’t mistake the dead bodies strewn next to you for the images flickering on the walls of a cave."

The settings are significant as representations of the characters' choices (and reactions, for there are not always true choices): Belgrade and Washington DC. From the Ferhadja Mosque to the Hirshhorn Sculpture, the details matter; but the symbolic importance of the point of confluence, in Belgrade, where the Danube and Sava rivers meet, is perhaps most important of all.

Domnica Radulescu's style is spare and her language uncomplicated, perhaps deliberately, in light of the horrific details which underpin the story, from the Srebrenica massacres to the mass rapes and NATO bombings.

These devastating events play out alongside other losses (e.g. divorce, custody, adultery), tragedies broad and narrow, rooted in a "shiny web of lies and a second life of illicit encounters". This particular conflict perfectly reflects the reality of broader identities resulting in intimate betrayals, "lives of halves", a "missed heartbeat".

Occasionally there is an emotive burst (Sarajevo described as a "delicious secret" and an experience as a "volcano of sorrow") but the language is simple. The structure is chronological, with half the book covering a broader swath of time (1980 - 2003) and the second half covering only 2003 and 2004. The narrative voice is first-person, consistent and direct.

Ultimately the novel's success lies in characterization, but this is a difficult connection to forge because of the element of distance inherent in the key relationships. Domnica Radulescu uses the motif of audience and performance to allow the reader to settle into a seat from which they can view at a distance.

Lara is named for the heroine of Doctor Zhivago, a story better known via the film version than the book, an American interpretation better known than the Russian original.

She imposes the perspective she learned from Hollywood on everyone she encounters, one man her Marlboro Man and another a mix of Clark Gable and Omar Sharif. She recognizes the tilt of a woman's chin to be the same angle as Ingrid Bergman's in the final scene of "Casablanca".

Both these references include strong relational plots but ultimately their stories are shaped by war, just as in Country of Red Azaleas.

This review originally appeared on BuriedInPrint.

Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu sets up as a story of war where best friends Lara and Marija separate. Lara leaves war-torn Sarajevo, and Marija stays. The book ends up a biography of Lara's life, a story of love, marriage, parenthood, and a search for Marija. More than the main character, the writing engages me enough to carry the story to its conclusion.

Read my complete review at: http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2016/03/country-of-red-azaleas.html

Reviewed based on a publisher’s galley received through NetGalley

Une intellectuelle roumaine fuit son pays du temps de en passant par Trieste. Récit intéressant, surtout du fait de l'évocation de l'ambiance et de la civilisation d'Europe de l'Est avant la chute du Mur de Berlin. Mais le livre manque curieusement d'unité, la deuxième partie sur la vie américaine de l'exilée n'ayant que peu de liens avec le récit de sa fuite.

Beautifully written and emotionally engaging.

I really enjoyed it! I was a little bit surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Reading the back I thought it sounded good but that it wasn't the sort of book which would jump out at me as a "I must read this book!" if I was browsing in a bookshop. I will definitely be looking for Domnica Radulescu's other book with a view to reading it.

This book has a lovely feel to it. It reminded me in it's style of those I've read by Mary Doria Russell, Farahad Zama and Chimanda Ngozi Adichie and those are some of my favourite writers so it definitely ranks up there. It's written in the first person which I sometimes find grates on me but this worked really well and drew me in.

This book had the added bonus of being disability positive. Nora, the main character has one hand (and one breast) smaller than the other. She thinks it's because her twin brother squashed her in womb. It's something she isn't overly comfortable with at the beginning of the book. However she's an artist and she comes to learn that she can use her different hands to do different things in her drawing and learns to see it as a very positive thing. At one point she is told she's lucky to have hands like that. It was very well handled and at no point was Nora labelled as disabled, it was just part of who she is.

I also thought that it wasn't predictable. Which is always good in a book. Reading the back I had preconceived ideas that "this will happen quite early in the story and then not long after that this will happen..." based on what it said happened. But the book actually followed it's own path and things happened when they happened not when I expected. I do like books like that.

I would definitely recommend this book

Train to Trieste follows the life of Mona Manoliu starting when she is a teenager in Romania during the reign of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Times are hard, there are food shortages and restrictions everywhere, and people live in fear and suspicion. However, life goes on, and in the midst of the fear and deprivation Mona falls in love for the first time with a mysterious boy named Mihai. When Mona's family begins to die in improbable accidents she flees Romania for safety.
Years later she is living in America, trying to forget her past and build a new life. But she can't forget Mihai, her first love, and the summer she left him behind. She returns to Romania determined to learn the truth of what happened the summer she left.

This book is a nice addition to the many historical fiction books that have become so popular. It gives a clear accounting of what happened in Romania in the late 1970's under Ceausescu and how it affected the lives of ordinary people. The story is beautifully and poetically written. Unfortunately the plot is a bit slow and its easy to lose interest in Mona's plight. I listened to this book on audio, read by Yelena Shmulenson and her thick Yiddish accent definitely adds a lot of atmosphere to the story.

This is a story of young love during the time just before the Romanian revolution and the toppling off Nicolae Ceausescu''s oppressive regime. Our main character and narrator is Mona who lives with her parents in Bucharest. Her parents resist the political regime where they can in an atmosphere of fear generated by the underhand activities of the secret police. Mona has a passionate affair with Mihai whom she can never be sure is not a member of the secret police. As their living conditions become intolerable Mona is assisted to leave Romania and start a new life in mid west America without telling Mihai. Some twenty years later she returns to her homeland to find out what happened to her first love.
I plodded through this book hoping it would get better for me and it did but only a little. It is a good story and I am somewhat perplexed as to why I did not enjoy it more. I wonder if it was the flowery descriptive writing? Or was it that I didn't feel anything for Mona? I am still not sure. The ending is abrupt and unfinished and therefore disappointing. Towards the end of the book Mona finds out that her father wrote a manuscript during the years of the oppressive Romanian regime and she sets out to discover what happened to it. This new twist then seems to fade away without conclusion.
In summary, I enjoyed finding out about Romania, it's culture and people and I could recommend it for that fact alone. I think the book would make a fantastic film with a strong story set in two continents..