Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Taut, searing, and sharp, van Llewyn’s novel is a lyrical jewel.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Read as a whole, though, the novel is a strikingly original work. The only moments where she falters are when she dips toward a magical realism that winds up feeling, because it occurs so scarcely, like an afterthought, and not an entirely necessary one. “I can see no point in sharing a bed with Liviu,” she writes, from Alina’s perspective, “if all I do is turn my back to him, wincing at his smell of alcohol.” Some chapters take the form of lists, like an early one strikingly titled “How To Attract (Unwanted) Attention From the Communist Authorities.” For the most part, van Llewyn’s experiments with the novel’s form work well. The chapters are as brief and intense as flashes of lightning in a storm. This short debut novel, by a Romanian writer who lives in Germany, is narrated in even shorter chapters that skip around in time and point of view. When Liviu’s brother defects to the West, the couple falls under increasing scrutiny, and Alina finds herself forced to entertain a Secret Services agent every Tuesday afternoon. It’s the 1970s, and they live in a small Romanian town Ceaușescu rules the country, which is gripped by suspicion and fear.

A young married couple struggles to survive Ceaușescu’s Romania.Īlina and Liviu’s marriage has begun to disintegrate.

Bottled goods sophie van llewyn