BOTTLED GOODS

Alina and Liviu’s marriage has begun to disintegrate. It’s the 1970s, and they live in a small Romanian town; Ceaușescu rules the country, which is gripped by suspicion and fear. 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. 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. The chapters are as brief and intense as flashes of lightning in a storm. So is van Llewyn’s prose. “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 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. Read as a whole, though, the novel is a strikingly original work.

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