This is a very interesting read and I learned a lot. Not what I was expecting but pleasantly surprised. Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to read this book

Something you may not know about me is that I'm Romanian - born, raised, and still here. I was born in 1993 and grew up in the aftermath of the disastrous communist regime, just as Eliade Moldovan, the author of These Lives, was leaving for Canada. I grew up with stories of what life used to be like during those years, and I still uncover so many new terrifying tales to this day. You can imagine this volume stood out to me immediately.

Moving on to the book itself, it's labeled as memoir, but the author switches often between personal events and retelling stories heard from the author's family, friends and acquaintances. Surprisingly, it captures what Romanian people used to be like up until the 90s better than any other bit of media I came across. There's always been this measure of mysticism in my early years that I still struggle to describe, and you'll get a good sense of what that looked like here - grandmas convinced they can speak to spirits of those who passed away, entire communities performing traditional rituals to appease evil or encourage prophetic dreams, and an ambiguous line between religion and myth that translated into our local flavor of faith.

This book manages to be brutal (warning - you'll hear dark tales of violence, torture and death) while being incredibly funny. It's another utterly Romanian trait in fact - "haz de necaz" îs probably our national motto, which loosely translates to "laughing in the face of misfortune". We tend to have a dark, dry sense of humor, and I'm now pretty convinced it was a sort of coping mechanism in the face of the extreme pressure and poverty that used to affect our previous generations.

As much as I enjoyed the contents, unfortunately that wasn't always true of the translation. I could tell a few expressions were translated verbatim and would've made a lot more sense in the original Romanian, but in English they were a bit awkward and got in the way of the pacing. I did also come across a few errors ("Hungry" instead of "Hungary" in a few spots - the Romanian saying for this is that the author was likely hungry himself and ate some of the letters). I did experience this as a Netgalley advance review copy, so my hope is that the final version was a bit more polished so people across the world can enjoy the stories for all they're worth.

All in all, glad I picked this up. I felt a true connection with the stories and it was a quick, entertaining read.

✨ Disclaimer ✨ I received a free copy of this book and this is my honest review.