Customer Reviews

Train to Trieste (Paperback)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
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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.

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.

Romance in difficult times. Fear and suspicion everywhere. Those who did not live in one of the 'socialist' east-european countries might understand a little more about how it was to suffocate under such a regime.

I want to give it six stars if they allow. One of the best books I haven't read for a long time. I am reading it again. The poetic pros caught my sight, and held me there for the rest of the book. I love the writer's voice. The characters are believable and sympathetic. The plot is intriguing.

I received this as a gift from my sister because I lived in Trieste many years ago and she thought I'd appreciate the story (although she had no idea what is was about). She paid $3 for it at a tiny bookstore in Oregon. What a purchase she made!

All I can say is read it. The narration is simplistic, yet riveting. The descriptions are beautiful and endearing. It is a story of having to grow up all too soon during extremely tragic and difficult times, yet having the courage to do what is necessary to survive. It is a story of love, false hopes and the pursuit of neverending dreams. It is a story filled with passion, romance, fear, violence, deceit, traditions and fate. The surprise at the end (I won't tell you) caught me completely off guard. Couldn't put it down and didn't want it to end.

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.

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!!!!

It's beautifully written and takes you away. That's what a good book should do. You become the characters and are with them through the story.