Iron Curtain

January 2, 2023
Goldsworthy (Chernobyl Strawberries) offers a witty and perceptive novel of love in the twilight of the Soviet Union. The year is 1984, and Milena Urbanska, the pampered daughter of a highly placed party official living in an unnamed Communist satellite country, is used to the finer things in life but chafes under the state scrutiny that goes along with it. Working as an English translator, she meets Jason Connor, a young British poet, whom she promptly sleeps with. After Jason returns to England, Milena books a trip to Cuba with a stopover in London, where she reunites with Jason and informs her parents she has no intention of returning home. Jason lives in a squalid flat in Bloomsbury, a marked change from the luxury Milena is used to. But before anyone can say “glasnost,” Milena is married to Jason and the mother of twin boys. Spied on by the Russians and saddled with eccentric in-laws (Jason’s mother looks like “the bohemian mistress of some double-initialed writer from the past”), Milena finds the grass less green than she expected. Goldsworthy’s perceptive and well-crafted story plays like The Americans as revised by Sally Rooney, with acidic observations worthy of the late Kingsley Amis. By flipping the Cold War script, Goldsworthy comes up with a winner.

February 1, 2023
A curtain of iron rarely foretells a happy romance. Belgrade-born, London-based Goldsworthy portrays an entitled woman who defects from an unnamed Soviet satellite to live and love in a decidedly un-entitled 1980s London. The description of Milena's pre-defection Cold War life behind the iron curtain as the vice-president's daughter is one of abundance rather than the bread lines most citizens face. That era's tiny minority of gilded youth, the children of the nomenklatura, were able to dance in Western jeans to the Beatles but lacked toilet paper or privacy. The violent death of Milena's lover, Misha, makes room for an English poet, Jason. Impoverished and untrustworthy, he convinces her to flee to the West and straight into British kitchen-sink realism. Goldsworthy's dismayed heroine finds herself in the grip of Thatcherite austerity, a hard sell after the dream life of a Red princess, and that compels her to question previously accepted truths. The irony of finding families, governments, and other institutions crumbling on both sides of the iron curtain and the Cold War propels this unusual, cutting, thought-provoking novel.

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Starred review from January 15, 2023
A woman abandons her Soviet life in pursuit of an ill-fated romance. In the early 1980s, Milena Urbanska is living comfortably as the daughter of one of the most powerful men in an unnamed Russian satellite state. After a gruesome accident takes the life of her boyfriend, Milena withdraws from social life, retreating instead into her work--first as a student, then as a translator. Years later, a brief tryst with cocky English poet Jason Connor shakes Milena out of her solitude. She falls in love and decides to trade her now claustrophobic-feeling life in the East for a shiny new life in the West. In England, Milena finds the transition jarring. She and her now-husband live in bohemian conditions, and she struggles daily to grapple with the perplexing value systems held by her capitalist neighbors. Milena narrates the story somberly from some future vantage and alludes frequently to the misfortunes that await her. ("I had a momentary premonition that this story would not end well"; "I could not know yet that London would be a city of sorrows for me.") Indeed, disillusionment and betrayal come, though all the anticipation might blunt the impact for some readers. The novel--which often reads as a Soviet-era reimagining of the Medea myth, in which a foreign woman uproots her life for love only to be met with treachery--is imbued with a certain fatalism. (Milena casts a shadow over her bid for independence right in the first chapter, when she asks, "How do you rebel when even your rebellion is anticipated?") Fatalism notwithstanding, this is an absorbing novel marked by Goldsworthy's humor, intelligence, and talent for making the familiar strange. A gripping tragedy about love and betrayal set near the end of the Cold War.

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