Iron Curtain
Iron Curtain by Vesna Goldsworthy is like holding up a funhouse mirror to different cultures — in this case, an unnamed Soviet Bloc country and England. (But like the novel Beyond Babylon by Igiaba Scego, Goldsworthy in Iron Curtain occasionally inserts little factoids and artifacts from other countries, underpinning the fact that even down to the most basic of things — let’s throw out food shopping as an example — everywhere has its own “way.”) Everything looks worse — or a little crazy — when viewed from a different vantage point.
A young woman with a privileged background (her father is one step below the president in this unnamed country) falls in love with the British poet to whom she’s assigned as the translator during his visit to a literary festival in her home country. A plot for her to move West is set in motion. Iron Curtain is a hard book to describe because a casual observer might think it a romance with some major made-for-tv vibes. The subtitle is “A Love Story,” after all. What seems like “freedom” for our protagonist Milena in her new life may not feel so “free” from another angle…hello, trope alert. This exploration of values could easily fall into that trap. It doesn’t. Rather, Iron Curtain is subtle and graceful and it does not surprise me in the least that Goldsworthy started her writing career partly as a poet. (Btw, Goldsworthy was born in Belgrade and then, like Milena, emigrated West and has a British husband. She writes in English.)
As I work on a book of essays circling the theme of homesickness — flipping the evergreen notion of “home” on its side just a bit — this was a super thought-provoking book to read to remind me that one’s person’s “trash” is another person’s “treasure.” (No, I’m not calling anyone’s culture “trash” — just borrowing the idiom, ok?) And that there isn’t a pat answer for the “best” way to live, a tension that always results in something stupefying instead of something that offers clarity for those who seek the latter. And maybe that tension is, actually, what homesickness is.
{Iron Curtain was a major sleeper surprise for me. I almost called it after page 3 bc I thought it was “historical romance.” Nope!}
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