Book Review | The Bucharest Dossier

Content warning: violence, death

My eighth book in the 2022 challenge is The Bucharest Dossier by William Maz. The book satisfies Category 12 of the challenge, a contemporary novel that takes place in communist times.

A bit of history

Most Americans don't know much about the Romanian Revolution, and even the ones who know some things probably don't know as much as they think. You may know that communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown in this revolution, and that he and his wife, Elena, were executed by a firing squad after a very quick military tribunal. You may even know that the protests that sparked the revolution started in Timișoara over the removal of a Hungarian pastor. Even if you know all those things about the Romanian Revolution, there's still a lot you don't know.

For instance, was the revolution entirely an inside job, or did they have outside help? People have long speculated that the CIA or the KGB (Russian/Soviet intelligence during their communist era), or maybe even both, covertly supported the revolutionaries. If the possibility of KGB support surprises you, know that then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Ceaușescu despised each other. But regarding what actually happened, the general public doesn't know any more about that than we did in 1989. It was also widely speculated that the Ceaușescus had Swiss bank accounts, but nothing was ever proven. If those accounts existed, what happened to the money? The novel explores this and other open questions surrounding the revolution.

The book

Maz describes this book as a love story inside a spy thriller inside a historical novel. The history in question is the last days of Romania's communist government, i.e., the days leading up the 1989 revolution.

The protagonist, Bill Heflin, is a CIA analyst who is encouraged by one of his Russian contacts to come to Bucharest, Romania's capital, as the communist regime there is crumbling.

What Heflin's Russian contact knows that even many of his CIA colleagues don't is that Heflin is actually Romanian by birth and came to the US with his family as a child. Even "Bill Heflin" is a name he chose for himself as a young man, and only a handful of people know his birth name.

Among the many people Heflin left behind when his family fled Romania was his childhood love, Pusha. Could he find her when he returns to Bucharest?

What I liked

Maz has a lot of fun with the things we don't know about the Romanian Revolution. Was the CIA involved? The KGB? Intelligence agencies from other neighboring countries? Did the Ceaușescus have secret foreign bank accounts? Intriguing elements like these are the backbone of any good spy story, and Maz delivers on this front.

Maz also spends more time than you might expect examining the immigrant experience and what it's like to have multiple cultural identities, and I consider this time very well spent. Although born in Romania, both Heflin and Maz are of predominantly Greek ancestry and spent time in a Greek refugee camp between leaving Romania and arriving in the US. In Romania, his family were the Greeks. In Greece, they were the Romanians. In the US, they were the immigrants until Heflin changed his name. It's almost certainly not a coincidence that he seems most comfortable around other people with similar experiences.

While the book is ultimately from a pro-American perspective, it's not an entirely uncritical one. Heflin witnesses events and learns things about some of his intelligence community colleagues that leave him quite disillusioned by the time he leaves Bucharest. Maz further explores the history of that time and the moral questions that people face in such situations in this fascinating guest post for Crime Reads.

What I didn't like

I'm always concerned when a book's protagonist shares a lot of similarities with its author. In my experience, books like that often tend to veer into wish-fulfilling territory, and there's some of that here. At times Heflin feels like an idealized version of Maz as a young man. It doesn't happen enough to derail the book for me, but I know this is something that turns off many readers.

Overall verdict

I don't read a lot of spy thrillers, so I wasn't sure what to expect going into this. I feared it would be a dumb plot-driven fantasy (in the sense of wish fulfillment, not genre), but those fears were mostly unfounded. It was also enjoyable to get yet another angle on what living under communism was like in Romania. In short, it's a fun page turner with enough contemplative elements to keep it from becoming a generic potboiler.

What's next?

The next book is The Bone Fire by György Dragomán. This satisfies Category 21, a novel with a woman protagonist.

Do you like spy thrillers? If so, what are some of your favorites? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Book Review | I'm an Old Commie!

My seventh book in the 2022 challenge is I'm an Old Commie! by Dan Lungu. The book satisfies Category 13 of the challenge, a psychological novel.

The book

The story centers around Emilia, a retired woman who was a metalworker in a factory during Romania's communist era and has struggled to adjust both to life after the fall of communism and to aging. Her daughter Alice has left the country and established a life in Canada with her new husband.

One day Alice calls Emilia to discourage her from voting for the former communists in upcoming local elections. To Alice's horror, Emilia expresses some nostalgia for the life she had in those times. As the novel progresses, we learn that Emilia credits the communist system for getting her out of the rural life where she grew up into a more sophisticated urban life. Emilia also misses the camaraderie that she enjoyed with her coworkers.

However, Emilia also has enough self-awareness to understand that her perceptions of the past might not match up with reality. The rest of the novel involves her examining past memories and talking to people who knew her in her factory days.

What I liked

There's a lot more humor than you might expect from a book like this. Nicolae Ceaușescu was one of the more brutal European communist dictators, and his national money-saving efforts caused a lot of suffering among the Romanian people. But even this didn't stop people from telling jokes about the dictator and his equally notorious wife, Elena. Several jokes about the Ceaușescus appear in the book, and there are many other funny interactions among the characters themselves.

That said, no system is all good or all bad. And it's not like corruption ceased to exist in Romania after the Ceaușescus were removed from power. It's easy to understand why Emilia feels nostalgia for a time that was bad for many people around her because she benefitted from those circumstances. It explains a lot of political choices in any country, come to think of it.

What I didn't like

There were two things that frustrated me about this book. The first is that it's kind of just a series of conversations and flashbacks. Since nearly the entire book involves Emilia looking over her past, not a whole lot happens in the main timeline. There are times when that works, usually with the present-day timeline as a framing device for a past story (think Titanic). But the past anecdotes don't form a cohesive story on their own.

The other thing I didn't like was that the story just kind of ended. Obviously all stories end at some point, but usually there's some illustration of whatever transformation has taken place over the course of the story, and I didn't really get that here.

Overall verdict

The theme of examining nostalgia for when times were different resonates with me. There's also kind of a sub-theme that Emilia is blind to the privilege she had, which also often makes for good material. Despite feeling that the plot stakes were kind of low, I still recommend the book. The characters are well developed, and the story sheds light on a time and place that a lot of Americans might not know much about.

What's next?

The next book is The Bucharest Dossier by William Maz. This satisfies Category 12, a contemporary novel where the action takes place in communist times. If the title gives you spy thriller vibes, you're right, but there's more to the story than that. Stay tuned!

Can you think of a time when nostalgia has clouded your judgement? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Book Review | My Sister, the Serial Killer

Content warning: violence, death, partner abuse, child abuse

My sixth book in the 2022 challenge is My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite. The book satisfies Category 16 of the challenge, a popular novel published after 2010. I have chosen to interpret popular to mean commercial. This refers more to a novel's aims more than its quality. Indeed, this book was nominated for the Booker Prize, as have other books that most readers would deem commercial. But commercial books tend to be more accessible and plot-driven than their more literary counterparts. Not better or worse, just different. A blog post on Spread the Word offers a thoughtful discussion on the differences between commercial and literary fiction, as well as times that they can overlap.

The book

Korede, a Lagos-based nurse, would do anything for her sister Ayoola. This includes Korede using her medical training to clean up after Ayoola kills her boyfriends. The book begins right after the third killing. However, Korede's loyalties are tested when Ayoola shows interest in a doctor colleague that Korede has had her eye on for ages; even more so when that interest appears to be returned.

In the meantime, Korede airs her frustrations, including describing her sister's crimes and her own complicity in them, by talking to a comatose patient in the hospital where she works. But what happens when that patient wakes up? What does the patient remember, and what does he want to do about it?

As the story progresses, we learn more about why Korede, and to a lesser extent, Ayoola, make the choices they do. While you may not endorse the sisters' behavior, you do come to understand it better.

What I liked

The book is a really easy read. It doesn't get as grim as you might expect, given the subject matter. I'm not opposed to grimness when it serves the story, but after Beloved and Goliath, this was a palate cleanser.

Also, it was cool to read a story set in contemporary Africa—Nigeria in this case. Being in the US, not only are a lot of books set here, but it's also easy not to branch out. There's definitely enough material that I could only read books set in the US for the rest of my life if I wanted. But part of the fun of reading for me is getting insight into how people who are different from me live their lives. And while, for the most part, contemporary Nigerians are motivated by the same things as Americans, and presumably people just about everywhere, there are some differences that it's good to be aware of.

For instance, Braithwaite touches on how powerful men are often given license to basically do whatever they want, regardless of who they hurt in the process. Certainly that happens a lot here, too, but there were elements that played out differently because of that specific setting.

What I didn't like

Most of the chapters in this book were super short, like 2-3 pages. That's neither good nor bad in itself, but in this particular case, I felt like it kept me from getting to know the main characters as well as I would have liked.

Overall verdict

This was a quick, fun read for me, which is generally what commercial fiction aims for. That said, it did give us at least some depth to the main characters, which commercial fiction often lacks. If you're the kind of reader who gets frustrated when characters make choices that you disagree with morally, this book probably isn't for you, but then again, neither is most reading.

What's next?

I'm going back to Romanian literature with the next book, which is I'm an Old Commie! by Dan Lungu. This satisfies Category 13, a psychological novel. This will also be my first book by a living Romanian author.

Do you enjoy stories about family dilemmas? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Book Review | Goliath

Content warning: violence

My fifth book in the 2022 challenge is Goliath by Tochi Onyebuchi. The book satisfies Category 1 of the challenge, a book published in 2022. This also means we're already one-fifth of the way through the challenge! Can you believe it?

The book

The main story takes place in the 2050s, where our planet is an irradiated and otherwise polluted shell of its former self. The wealthy and privileged have left to live in space colonies, while everyone left behind is trying to eke out an existence however they can.

Wrecking crews demolish abandoned houses and salvage as much of the materials as they can for homes in the space colonies. Some people from the colonies choose to return to Earth, but their experiences aren't the same as those of people who've been there the whole time, i.e., gentrification.

The timelines jump back and forth, as do the locations. The book makes the curious choice not to reveal the main incident that led to a lot of the disasters underpinning the story until about three-quarters of the way in.

What I liked

The premise of the story is fascinating, and Onyebuchi does a great job of worldbuilding. The things happening in this future world are plausible, in large part because similar things have already happened in this world, minus the space travel element. Since time immemorial, the haves have found ways to separate themselves from the have-nots, and there's no reason to suspect that will change in the future.

Also, the book deals with a lot of extremely relevant issues, including racism, classism, gentrification, and climate change. In some instances these issues are dealt with in ways that stick with the reader.

What I didn't like

Wow, is there a lot going on in this book. With all the different characters, plotlines, and timelines, it’s hard to keep track of everything.

A side effect of this is that we don't really get to know any of the characters in any meaningful depth. You might remember in my discussion of Beloved that I praised Morrison for creating fleshed-out characters that enhanced the book as a story. This was significantly less true of Goliath, where several characters felt more like stand-ins for principles that the author wanted to portray than actual people.

Overall verdict

I wanted so badly to like this book more than I do. Perhaps even more importantly, I don't want to be the person who doesn't like a current book from a respected author who writes about issues that are critical in our time. But for me, the book is less than the sum of its parts. There's so much jumping around and so many things to jump between that I never felt like I got to know any of the characters in any depth.

Also throughout much of the first half, I didn't understand the author's choices for who to follow and to what extent. The reader gets a lot of backstory for some characters who just kind of end up as footnotes by the end. The book might have been stronger if it had centered more on the demolition crew and less on other characters.

What's next?

I'm dipping into something more commercial with the next book, which is My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite. This satisfies Category 16, a popular novel published after 2010.

Have you ever found a book simultaneously brilliant and frustrating? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Interlude - 5 alternative challenge books

Goliath is taking longer than planned. So to give you something, I thought I'd talk about a few books that would be great for this challenge except that I've already read them. Maybe you'll find something for your TBR (to be read) list! I've included them here in reverse chronological order of publication.

#FashionVictim

#FashionVictim by Amina Akhtar (2018) is simultaneously the most commercial and probably the most polarizing book mentioned in this post. Many reviewers have described this book as The Devil Wears Prada meets American Psycho. I'd throw in bits of The Talented Mr. Ripley while we're at it. The protagonist, Anya, is a disrespected fashion industry writer who decides to take out her frustrations with her coworkers through homicide. She also happens to be really funny, and the book skewers a lot of fashion industry tropes along the way. If you enjoy some dark humor in situations like I've described, check this out.

Logicomix

This 2009 graphic novel by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou is inspired by the life and work of logician Bertrand Russell, which might not sound like your idea of a good time. And it might not be. But I'd argue that the book is really more about how we know what we know, and how things often tend to be more based on assumptions than we realize (hence the subtitle "An Epic Search for Truth"). If you're interested in exploring those ideas, Logicomix is a fun way to do so. Set theory never looked so entertaining.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

This 2007 novel by Mohsin Hamid made the short list for that year’s Booker Prize. The book is told in a single monologue by Changez, a Pakistani man who comes to the US to study finance at Princeton. After graduation, he is hired by a consultancy firm for lots of money but feels like he isn't truly accepted by American society. These feelings are only exacerbated when the 9/11 attacks happen and some people conflate him with the people who perpetrated the attacks, even though those people weren't Pakistani. This causes Changez to reassess his desire for success in America, among other things. It's an interesting examination of what I'd call the flip side of the American dream.

Black No More

The full title of this novel by George S. Schulyer is Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933-1940. So you might be wondering, is it science fiction or satire? And the answer is, yes. The premise of the story is that a scientist comes up with an easy way to turn black people white. But when that happens, who can racists target? Spoiler alert: they find equally ignorant things to fixate on. Also hilarity ensues. Nobody is safe from parody, including luminaries like W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, whose thinly-veiled caricatures appear in the story.

Skylark

Skylark is a 1924 novel by Dezső Kosztolányi that takes place around the turn of the twentieth century in what turns out to be the latter days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Skylark is the pet name that a couple has for their daughter. But Skylark is considered unattractive and is past the age when most women get married when the story starts. This has not stopped her parents from centering their lives around her; indeed, it might make them even more motivated to do so. However, when Skylark is invited to spend a week with other family members, her parents start to dip back into things they enjoyed in the past. Skylark is short on plot but long on characterization and beautiful writing.

Conclusion

While it's impossible to cover everything in five books, this post offers some diverse books to consider for future reading. And going forward, I plan to be more conscious of switching things up in my book selection for the challenge. These first five books have skewed heavily toward important literary fiction, and that can turn into a slog, which is why I've already set up some lighter fare once I finish Goliath. See you next week!

Book Review | Beloved

Content warning: violence, death, homicide, slavery, racism, bestiality, sexual assault/abuse

My fourth book in the 2022 challenge is Beloved by Toni Morrison. The book satisfies Category 10 of the challenge, a book that received a national literary award; namely, the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

The book

I could have easily chosen this book for the controversial novel category, as it definitely provokes strong feelings in its readers. I didn't want to talk about this aspect of the book, but I feel like I have to, especially with all the laws and potential laws attempting to govern what we can and can't say about history and race.

The discourse

In the negative Goodreads reviews for Beloved, one common complaint is that the reader felt Morrison wrote the book to make white people feel guilty. Let's examine this claim.

As you might expect from a book primarily told from the perspectives of former slaves, the portrayal of most of the white people in it is less than flattering. And why would it be otherwise? Slavery is a disgusting chapter in our country's history. I'd even say sugarcoating it does a disservice to the horrors that people experienced under slavery.

That said, I don't think making white people feel guilty was among Morrison's intentions for the book. For one thing, she talked about how difficult the book was for her to write. Oh, reading about slavery's atrocities makes you uncomfortable? Imagine that the victims in these stories are your ancestors. Not only that, but to ensure that the story felt authentic, Morrison imagined herself in her characters' shoes in various situations, including the parts where they make some gruesome choices.

It's true that Morrison didn't prioritize the comfort of white readers in Beloved, or probably in any of her books. That's not the same thing as intentionally trying to make white people feel guilty, though. As white people, so much is centered around our preferences that if we don't seek out other perspectives, anything that isn't made for us can feel like an attack. But it isn't. We're not always the good guys, and telling those stories is totally fair game.

As of this writing, there is a bill working its way through the state legislature in Florida that would prohibit teachers from teaching anything that would make any individual feel guilt or discomfort. Now even if it's signed into law, I think even the current Supreme Court will strike it down as unconstitutional. But the fact that it's even gotten this far in the process should concern people. Education that never challenges you and only tells one side of the story isn't education; it's propaganda. There isn't a country in the world that doesn't have shameful events in its history, and we should be able to discuss those events honestly.

OK, with all that out of the way, let's discuss Beloved as a work of art.

Summary

The book's protagonist, Sethe, is a woman who attempts to escape slavery with her children. At one point Sethe is close to being captured and kills one of her daughters, Beloved, to prevent her from being captured into slavery. Although Sethe and her other children ultimately don't have to return to slavery, the trauma of their experiences haunts them in different ways, and Beloved's spirit haunts the house where Sethe lives in isolation with Denver, her youngest daughter and the only surviving child of Sethe's who hasn't run away.

The story begins 18 years after Beloved's death. Because of Sethe's actions, she's an outcast and basically only leaves the house to go to her job as a restaurant cook, which is where she also gets her food. By this point Denver has not left the house in years. But Sethe and Denver seem more or less at peace with Beloved's spirit haunting the house, accepting it like another member of the family.

Everything changes when Sethe receives a visit from Paul D, one of her fellow former slaves from a Kentucky plantation called Sweet Home (clearly Morrison's sense of irony was fully functional). Paul D has been harboring a crush on Sethe since they were at Sweet Home, and since Sethe's husband is almost certainly dead, she's available for a relationship, at least in theory.

In practice, Sethe is not accustomed to letting people in physically or emotionally, but against the odds, she invites Paul D to stay. Paul D, however, isn't so comfortable with Beloved's spirit hanging around, so he drives the spirit from the house. After that, Paul D, Sethe, and Denver start to build a life together.

One day Paul D takes Sethe and Denver to a local carnival, and when they return home, a young woman is sitting in front of the house. When they ask her who she is, she says her name is Beloved. Since she appears to be the same age that Sethe's daughter would have been had she lived, Sethe and Denver immediately assume the young woman is some sort of manifestation of the Beloved who died 18 years prior. However, Beloved's presence stresses Sethe's relationship with Paul D, ultimately prompting him to leave. Over time Sethe behaves more erratically as Beloved's behavior turns parasitic.

What I liked

It's not necessary to be a master of the language to be an effective writer, but it's so nice when you encounter one, which Morrison is. For example:

Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon—everything belonged to the men who had the guns.

Beloved, Part One

I love the way that Morrison combines the beautiful imagery from nature with the brutality of, in this instance, a prison chain gang.

Another thing I liked about this book was that it wasn't preachy. I felt like the characters were fully realized and not just stand-ins for principles that Morrison wanted to illustrate. It's all too common in books that try to make political points that the characters are one-dimensional straw men. But with Beloved, even when I didn't like a choice that a character made, at least I believed it. No character is completely good or beyond redemption. That's a testament to the book as a work of art, which sometimes gets buried in all the discourse about the book's themes.

What I didn't like

About two-thirds of the way through the book, there are these stream-of-consciousness monologues from Sethe, Denver, and Beloved that eventually merge into some kind of counterpoint. While they're some of the most beautifully written passages in the book, I didn't feel they advanced the story. They just put extra emphasis on something I already thought was pretty clear by that point.

Overall verdict

If it isn't obvious by now, I highly recommend this book. Especially if you're white and had to read Gone With the Wind in high school, as I did. Yes, there is a lot of disturbing material in there. But we owe it to ourselves to know the truth about what slavery was like.

Incidentally, although the book mostly concerns former slaves' experiences and how degrading and even dehumanizing those experiences were, Morrison points out that the perpetrators of slavery also damaged their own humanity in the process. She expressed a similar view years later in an interview with Charlie Rose. If you're the kind of person who has to treat other people as less than human to feel good about yourself, what does that say about you?

Tl;dr - you shouldn't read Beloved because it's good for you. You should read it because it's good.

What's next?

My next book will be Goliath by Tochi Onyebuchi. It satisfies Category 1 of the challenge, a novel published in 2022. This appears to be another one that makes some readers uncomfortable, so I'm curious to see how it plays out.

Have you read Beloved? What's your favorite book that made you uncomfortable? Drop your thoughts in the comments!