Radiant Days

Radiant Days is thick with detail, angst, desperation, ennui, and culture shock. The story is set in post-soviet Budapest where expats live cheaply and spout philosophy and political theory without doing much else. Our hero, Anthony, accompanies Gisela to Hungary and finds he might be there under false pretenses. As the lies and truths are revealed they don't seem to mean much to him - he is interested only in his modest goals of appearing cool and screwing Gisela. The story moves to the Balkans (during the height of the war) and life gets riskier and more complicated. Michael FitzGerald tells a story within a story - how an average college educated American can know so little about the rest of the world and the history of long time animosities, that everything has to be explained to him as he travels. Fitzgerald is brutally truthful with all his characters - at times I hated some and liked others, only to have my position switched in the next fifty pages. I loved this book, and I can't stop thinking about it!

Having lived through the tech boom in San Francisco and in Eastern Europe at basically the same time -- I was excited to read this book and was not disapointed. Fitzgerald captures the feeling of that time in the Bay Area very well -- even more so of the ex-pat and English speaking community in Budapest -- it really brought me back. The characters are loveable -- especially the British reporter. The lead character, while also loveable is one I could relate to, in a familiar way -- he also reminds me of why I rarely date Americans. After having read this book, I can now die happy with no regrets. It completes me.

This is a fantastic novel. The very act of placing a dot-com era san-franciscan in the middle of the yugoslav wars is as hilarious as it is tragic, a move that isn't just brilliant, but also courageous and important. But the best part of this book is the narrator. In all of his selfishness and restlessness, he's truer to life than most other characters in contemporary literature. Anyone offended by his observations hasn't looked deep enough within their own desires. The world that Fitzgerald creates is like our own world, in that it's not populated by heroes or villains, but by humans. In addition, it's a fast-paced page-turner of a book. I took two tylenol PMs before I started it, and couldn't fall asleep until I'd finished part one.

At a time when people say the word "war" daily without bothering to conjure up the details even yearly, we need books like Radiant Days. This novel traces a terrifying and previously unimaginable trajectory from the smug, insular affluence of 1990s San Francisco to nameless, offhand death in the streets of war-torn Croatia. There is something essentially American about FitzGerald's hero's voluntary tour of the killing fields, and I don't just mean the sex and drugs. It is no stretch to say that this book may well be the Farewell to Arms of our generation.