The Romanian: Story of an Obsession

Benderson, Bruce, "The Romanian: Story of an Obsession", Tarcher/ Penguin, 2006. An Intellectual Triumph Amos Lassen and Literary Pride If you are in the mood for a serous book that will indeed make you think, pick up a copy of Bruce Benderson's "The Romanian: Story of an Obsession" and I can promise you that you will not be disappointed. I knew nothing about it and the more I read the more surprised I became and the more... Read Full Review

I am straight and was wonderfully surprised how "The Romanian" depicted facets of my own love life and how Benderson's relationship with his mother was similar --the same suffocating control and tenderness. Benderson jolts us right out of our outdated heterosexual and homosexual bourgeois notions. Whether it is his mother or a shameful street hustler, Benderson is only too aware that we are all flawed; that we are only all... Read Full Review

While I may like this book partly because I know its main locale, anyone who has ever loved a person or a place with pain, obsessed, fantasized, felt exiled, or contemplated history and fate, will find this a fascinating read.

I just finished reading The Romanian, after a 4-day marathon of more or less non-stop reading. It is going to remain on my desk for a while, as I intend to re-read and re-savor it. In addition to the vibrant telling and the always lush use of language, what's most impressive about The Romanian is Benderson's fluid and seemingly effortless fusion/synthesizing of the three major narratives that run through the book: Benderson's... Read Full Review

Few projects can sound less promising than a 400-page chronicle of a pudgy middle-aged Jew's erotic obsession with a scraggly Romanian hustler, but Bruce Benderson has written a minor classic. What so easily might have been pretentious soft-core sociology intent on justifying its author and titillating its readers has been transformed into a tale that is by turn comically masochistic, depraved, psychologically lacerating and... Read Full Review