Romania: Black Sea Twilight, by Domnica Radulescu

Nora is a talented artist growing up in Mangalia on the Black Sea Coast of Romania. Gigi, her boyfriend is from a Turkish family in the same town. Nora dreams of going to art school and Gigi of becoming a ship's captain like his father, while Nora's twin brother Valentin has been sent to live with his aunt Raluca in Bucharest, so that he can study piano. But Communist Romania under the brutal and oppressive regime of Nicolae Ceausescu is not an easy place to grow up. The slightest joke or innocent teenaged escapade might bring someone to the attention of the secret police.

This was an absorbing story, following the fortunes of Nora, Gigi, Valentin, and of Anoushka, the young French woman with a mysterious past whom Gigi and Nora rescue from the sea in a storm, and Didona, Valentin's first love, a gypsy from the State Circus.

However, I felt the author was using the story to cram in as much as she could of the recent history of Romania. So, while the first part of the story, until Nora reaches Paris, unfolded naturally, there were some odd passages later in the story: Nora receives a letter from her mother in which her mother tells the story of her own early life. On a train trip to see France, Anoushka suddenly launches into the story of her own early life in Hungary and Romania. And Nora hangs out in Paris with a group of young artists, actors and directors, who argue vigourously about the merits of Parisian culture and the fact that many of the most prominent artists there are Romanian immigrants.

A bibliography at the end of the book seems to bear out that the author wanted to impart factual information about Romania as much as to tell a story.

Despite these sometimes awkward intrusions, which could have been trimmed down without hindering the flow of the narrative, I enjoyed reading this book.

Domnica Radulescu was born in Romania and won a national prize for a volume of short stories when she was twenty, but fled during Nicoae Ceaucsecu's dictatorship and settled in the United States as a political refugee in 1983. She is a professor at Washington and Lee University in Virginia.