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The Train Store - Train to Trieste
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List Price: $23.95
Our Price: $11.97
Your Save: $ 11.98 ( 50% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Knopf
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780307268235
ISBN: 0307268233
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: 2008-08-05
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: 2008-08-05
Studio: Knopf
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Mixed feelings
Comment: In the seventies I visited Romania several times as a travelling student and encountered many strange things and lovely people there, so I was very interested in this semi-autobiographical novel about the dark recent past of this country. And indeed, several of my recollections revived thanks to this book. The way she describes the uncertainties about who you could trust and who not, are very illustrative. For this alone, the book is to be recommended if you want to understand a bit of that dreadful period. At the same time, she also conveys much of the lively spirit many a Romanian still had despite the misery.
On the other hand, however, I must say that I had to nearly skip many a passage in order to keep the story alive. The author regularly dwells a bit long in a flowery style about things which distract from the main story. Also, at the end of the book, everything seems to land too easily on its feet in a rather short chapter.
Still, this book may induce me to revisit this country, after so many years. Note that my 'mixed feelings' are partly a reflection of my feelings about what apparently could happen to the inhabitants of this beautiful country, in terms of mutual trust. Let's hope they will have a bright future.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Narrative Gem
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: From Bucharest and Back
Comment: Travelling frequently to Romania during much of the period covered in this book, I found it right on target in describing the utter lunacy of that communist system.Romanians had to put up with much: Lack of food in a country that produced mountains of food (it was exported for hard currency); a society ruled by the secret police; a dictator who was barely literate, citizens who lacked for everything from heat in their homes to sanitary napkins for women. In a word every economic and social deprivation you can think of in a modern society existed in the Romania of that period (from the 50s to the end of the 80s) The author catches flavor flawlessly and combines it with a love story that is sweet but not sugary. The problem occurs when she leaves Europe and comes to America as an indigent immigrant. Here the story loses its vigor and interest since it is a fairly standard example of an immigrant's American success story.
I assume that much of this story is autobiographical. The heroine, like the author, escaped from Romania, studied in America, teaches in a university and has two sons (presumably the auhtor is, like the heroine, also divorced since she doesn't mention a husband in her book jacket
bio). Domnica Radulescu writes a straight forward story with ease and conviction. There aren't phoney literary flourishes, the characters come alive, the mood envelopes the reader, the setting is authentic.
A book to be recommended for an easy, pleasant read on a winter's night.
Customer Rating:
Summary: interesting time period but that's about it
Comment: I was disappointed in this novel, especially since authors Sandra Cisneros and Arthur Golden reviewed it so glowingly. The narrator, Mona Maria, speaks in the present tense throughout the book. She has a dreamy quality to her which makes her skim over details. At times the action is overly dramatic, yet there wasn't much suspense or build-up. I was confused about Mona's motives and also her reactions to events - considering she's the narrator, I would've expected more insight into her thought processes. Romania in the '70s and '80s is an interesting topic, but this book didn't do it justice.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A breathtaking read
Comment: 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.
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Editorial Reviews:
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An incandescent love story—a thrilling debut novel—that moves from Romania to America, from the Carpathian Mountains to Chicago, from totalitarianism to freedom, and from passionate infatuation to profound understanding.
In the summer of 1977, seventeen-year-old Mona Manoliu falls in love with Mihai, a mysterious, green-eyed boy who lives in Brasov, the romantic mountain city where she spends her summers. She can think of nothing, and no one, else. But life under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu is difficult. Hunger and paranoia infect everyone; fear, too. And one day, Mona sees Mihai wearing the black leather jacket favored by the secret police. Could he be one of them?
As food shortages worsen, as more and more of her loved ones disappear in “accidents,” Mona comes to understand that she must leave Romania. She escapes in secret—narrowly avoiding the police—through Yugoslavia to Italy, and then to Chicago, a city she calls “fit for my hunger.” But she leaves without saying a final good-bye to Mihai. And though she struggles to bury her longing for the past—she becomes a doctoral student, marries, has children—she finds herself compelled to return to her country, determined to learn the truth about her one great love.
Seductive, suspenseful, intensely evocative, and told in an astonishingly original, poetic voice, Train to Trieste is a force of language and emotion, as acutely observed as it is impossible to put down.
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