Train to Trieste

by: Domnica Radulescu

Published by: Vintage

Reviewed by Sarah Nagle

How do you make a life when your home is now in one country but your heart is still in another?

It is summer 1977 and Mona Maria Manoliu is visiting relatives in the pine-scented coolness of the Carpathians when she falls in love: “This moment–now–this Romanian summer in a small town in the Carpathian Mountains, I want it to last forever… ,” she thinks. Such a life with Mihai, however, is not to be. Young love is never easy, but in the totalitarian nightmare of Ceausescu’s Romania nothing is private or safe, and even the simplest actions have widening consequences, especially when the one you love may or may not be a member of the secret police.

For generations, Mona’s family has lived through war, and destruction, and repression, and a never-ending struggle with whatever surreal government is currently in charge. Mona, an intellectual like her father, wants only the freedom to be in love and study literature. It is the darkness before the 1989 dawn, however, and the promise of such a life is dimming. As her already-constricted world begins to collapse around her, Mona’s parents arrange for her to escape via train through Yugoslavia to Trieste and thence to the United States.

Friendless, yet determined to succeed in the frozen immensity of Chicago, Mona throws herself into a grinding routine of schooling and work and, after several years, is able to bring her parents over to join her in Chicago. Marriage, a teaching career, and children cannot extinguish her longing for her native soil and her first love–even though she has been told that Mihai died in the frenzied days of revolution in 1989.

Author Radulescu, who left Romania in 1983 and now teaches literature and theater in Virginia, says that her debut novel is not autobiographical. Only a native Romanian, however, could have captured the full colors and traditions of such a haunted land in such lush and evocative prose.

This debut novel, almost overwhelming in its romance and humanity, journeys through twenty years of a passionate woman’s life and comes back full circle to the pine-scented secrets of that Carpathian summer.

Armchair Interviews says: A 5-star work of a stunning debut novelist.