Burying the Typewriter

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 28 MAY 2012

Poet Bugan's (Crossing the Carpathians) memoir mixes tender and tough observations, mirroring the contradictions of growing up in Romania in the 1970s and '80s. As Dominika Dery did so affectingly in The Twelve Little Cakes, a 2004 coming-of-age tale set in a village outside Prague at roughly the same time, Bugan records a childhood marked by "bilingual" feelings and alternate worlds: one secure and joyful and the other a nightmare of secrecy and fear sparked by her dissident parents' covert activities. Her maturity accelerates as she receives a series of harsh lessons, beginning with the March 1977 earthquake ("the earth is weak and can slip from under me," she remembers). Other critical events include the death of her beloved grandmother; her discovery of propaganda at home and an illicit typewriter that her father hides by burying it each evening in the backyard; her traumatic interrogation at age 12 by the secret police; and her trip alone to the American Embassy in Bucharest to request political asylum. (The family went into exile in the U.S. just before communist president Nicolae Ceausescu's overthrow in 1989.) Many of Bugan's descriptions reach the sublime; for example, she compares keening for the loss of a loved one to poems, the best of which "pause on the sob in your throat, weeping both for what is beautiful and for what is lost to darkness and evil." But as with the pickled watermelon she mentions eating at holiday time, the sweet moments in Bugan's story offset the sour notes.