Train to Trieste

Domnica Radulescu's innovative and freshly coined 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 color 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.

Domnica Radelscu effortlessly gives her readers this gift of a novel with heartbreakingly beautiful language. Radelscu's words, the journey of this story, and her characterization of Mona convey a graceful accessibility. This is a beautiful novel.

I read the novel twice and both times I couldn't put it down. Fascinating characters and a truly captivating story set against the changing realities of different universes. Poetic and well written this is a book that I recommend to all my friends and family.

The novel's protagonist is the sort of character to whom most of us, I suspect, can identify. Who has not been torn by doubt about the direction in which our world, our countries, our own lives are headed? Second guessing the motives of others - especially those we allow ourselves to love - can send tremors through the core of our being as we seek anchors and enough "real" affection to get us through a reality that is at once both exquisitely beautiful and unjustifiably harsh. There's a little of a refugee in all of us who try to strike a balance between our need to draw closer and to believe wholeheartedly for the sake of an ideal, with our need to be sensible, and to protect ourselves and those we love. This beautifully wrought story reminds us that with luck--along with courage,a sense of humor, curiosity and passion--we can sustain ourselves through life's wild ups and downs, and deal with our hidden fears as we take on some very obvious ones. It's about hard experience, sweet memory...and survival.

Train to Trieste has all the tenderness, strength and passion, well written and entertaining that will keep you late at night to see what happens next. Domnica Radulescu give readers a good story with likable and credible characters. It is captivating and a pleasure to read.