ASTRONAUT!

A series of gruesome murders sparks a farcical response in totalitarian Romania.

This novel, set in 1989, toward the end of the reign of Nicolae Ceauşescu, finds the citizenry caught between a capitulation that some of them find abhorrent and resistance that seems futile. Either they believe and behave the way the government tells them to or they suffer the consequences. Alternating chapters advance the plot’s dual narratives. In the first, 7-year-old Lia, a guileless schoolgirl, brings suspicion upon her household when she attempts to buy a birthday present for her mother, using money that has been deemed contraband. She has done something wrong, but has no idea what. The second concerns a police investigator named Constantin, an uncommonly decent man whose moral convictions have turned his marriage into a cold war. He’s charged with leading the investigation into a series of killings, a thankless task that could involve the government, which the police, along with the rest of society, does everything to appease. When he wants to issue a warning to alert the country at large, the department decides to blame the deaths on a rampaging bear. Or perhaps more than one. The plot spirals out of totalitarian control, ultimately encompassing a traveling circus, a grade-school drawing contest, a dissident former professor, and a vast network of just about everyone spying and snitching on everyone. Just referring to an “astronaut” rather than a “cosmonaut” can get a little girl in big trouble. The plotlines eventually and inevitably converge, as the schoolgirl and the investigator both find themselves summoned to meet the president (who doesn’t seem nearly as powerful in person as in his media representation). Everyone but Lia knows the fix is in, but the country is beyond fixing.

A political satire captures the spirit of Marx meeting the Marx Brothers.