Type of bind: Paperback
EAN num: 9780385613682
ISBN number: 0385613687
Label: Doubleday Books
Manufacturer: Doubleday Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: 2008-08
Publishing house: Doubleday Books
Sale Popularity Level: 621638
Studio: Doubleday Books
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
In the summer of 1977, seventeen-year-old Mona Manoliu falls in love with Mihai, a mysterious boy who lives in the romantic mountain city where she spends her summers. She can think of nothing and no one else. But life under Nicolae Ceausescu is difficult. Hunger, paranoia and fear infect everyone. One day Mona sees Mihai wearing the grey leather jacket favoured by the secret police...is it possible he is one of them? As food shortages worsen and more of her loved ones disappear, Mona comes to understand that she must leave Romania. She escapes in secret - narrowly avoiding the police - through Yugoslavia to Italy, and finally to Chicago. But she leaves without saying a final goodbye to Mihai. And though she struggles to bury her longing for the past she finds herself compelled to return, determined to learn the truth about her one great love.An extraordinary debut, 'Train to Trieste' is a beautiful, powerful and intriguing love story that moves from passionate infatuation to profound understanding. Told in an astonishingly original, poetic voice Domnica Radulescu has shown herself to be a remarkable writer.
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Rated by buyers -
Domnica Radulescu's innovative and freshly coined very first novel
persuades us artfully while often hiding its deeper meanings.
Right off we share the physical thirst of a young woman, her
sense for colour and smell and the mouth-watering foods of her
female relatives, but all this is interwoven with an
insistent, and terrified awareness of a brutal and
diagnostically absurd communist dictatorship where you could
get seven years for proclaiming a symbolist poem. A third,
deeper level is her absolute love for a strangely haunting
Mihai whose nature comes to us through the complex responses
of a thoroughly feminine subjectivity. Working with these
levels is the movement through vividly experienced places:
Romanian mountains, Trieste and Rome, Chicago, all reflecting
the author's meditations on exile itself, as in Joyce or Ovid,
to whom she alludes aptly, and, even more, in much of humanity
through time: the anguish of uprootedness, the gnawing
nostalgia for a lost homeland, the thrill of discovering a new
city as you walk through it. Beneath the surfaces of exile and
the numerous Romania-specific gems, Radulescu sounds the
timeless and universal questions of power -- especially its
abuses, of love -- carnal-sexual, adulterous, inter-familial,
and of the search for knowledge -- as in the (literary)
languages Mona glides through with grace and humor. All this
plus its uninhibited lyricism and spunky emotionality earns
for "Train to Trieste" a place with "The Awakening" and "The
Bell Jar" as one of the truly achieved novels by a woman that,
by a seeming paradox, transcends the criterion of gender.
Rated by buyers -
Train to Trieste is a delicious tale of passionate love, filled with suspense, poetry and wicked humor. The female protagonist is vibrant, funny and sparkling; the male protagonist is sexy, brooding, surprising. The language is heartbreakingly beautiful. The nature, scenery and the cultural details are sensuous and colorful. It's one of the best books I've read in a long time.
Rated by buyers -
This is the best book I have read in many years! It's a wonderful love story, mixed with political suspense and with autobiographical accents, with which it is impossible not to identify, especially if you are Romanian born and you lived under Ceuasescu (which I did, like the main character in the book). It's a must read for many Americans, who will better understand what was going behind the Iron Curtain, and who will get to appreciate even more their own great country, as it is perceived by exiles' eyes. And, of course, a must read for Romanians living abroad consummed by "dor". I could not let the book out of my hands, I took it with me on a trip and I stayed most of the time at the hotel, reading it avidly, instead of visiting the sights. This says a lot about how good it is!!!! I recommend it wholeheartedly!!!!
Rated by buyers -
Train to Trieste is a riveting love story combined with political suspense.
I read it in a day because I couldn't put it down. The characters are likable and intriguing, the story is moving, the language stunning.
It is also very funny, the narrator's voice always takes you by surprise.
One of the best books I've read in a long time.
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