Publishers Weekly
01/02/2023
Goldsworthy (Chernobyl Strawberries) offers a witty and perceptive novel of love in the twilight of the Soviet Union. The year is 1984, and Milena Urbanska, the pampered daughter of a highly placed party official living in an unnamed Communist satellite country, is used to the finer things in life but chafes under the state scrutiny that goes along with it. Working as an English translator, she meets Jason Connor, a young British poet, whom she promptly sleeps with. After Jason returns to England, Milena books a trip to Cuba with a stopover in London, where she reunites with Jason and informs her parents she has no intention of returning home. Jason lives in a squalid flat in Bloomsbury, a marked change from the luxury Milena is used to. But before anyone can say “glasnost,” Milena is married to Jason and the mother of twin boys. Spied on by the Russians and saddled with eccentric in-laws (Jason’s mother looks like “the bohemian mistress of some double-initialed writer from the past”), Milena finds the grass less green than she expected. Goldsworthy’s perceptive and well-crafted story plays like The Americans as revised by Sally Rooney, with acidic observations worthy of the late Kingsley Amis. By flipping the Cold War script, Goldsworthy comes up with a winner. (Feb.)
Sunday Times - Nick Rennison
"Superb.… The divided continent has been at the heart of countless novels over the decades, but few can have been as cleverly crafted or better told than Vesna Goldsworthy’s Iron Curtain.… Brilliantly written."
Michael Frayn
"An extraordinary evocation of two wildly contrasted worlds.… Vesna Goldsworthy writes so well!"
William Boyd
"A wonderful, perfectly pitched novel: full of delightful intrigue and wry insight about the human predicament and its unique tensions."
Rachel Cusk
"Vesna Goldsworthy’s masterly novel retains the grace and resilience of literary art while wading deep into the most riveting human drama.… Goldsworthy is at once the most impartial and the tenderest of observers, a bold dramatist and a subtle humorist, and she has written a book so full of steel and compassion that it stands glitteringly apart."
Pat Barker
"Original and memorable.… A profound understanding of the timeless realities of love, betrayal, and the desire for revenge."
Guardian - James Stuart
"Atmospheric and gloriously vivid.…The pages fly by, and Goldsworthy’s careful scrutiny brings warmth and sympathy to her tale of belonging and betrayal. Tense, brooding and often hilarious, Iron Curtain finds bright sparks as well as bleakness in the cold war’s dying embers."
Observer - Alexander Larman
"Excellent… a comedy of manners that is nevertheless fraught with tension.… Goldsworthy captures the human perspective of life in the cold war superbly and sympathetically."
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2022-12-24
A woman abandons her Soviet life in pursuit of an ill-fated romance.
In the early 1980s, Milena Urbanska is living comfortably as the daughter of one of the most powerful men in an unnamed Russian satellite state. After a gruesome accident takes the life of her boyfriend, Milena withdraws from social life, retreating instead into her work—first as a student, then as a translator. Years later, a brief tryst with cocky English poet Jason Connor shakes Milena out of her solitude. She falls in love and decides to trade her now claustrophobic-feeling life in the East for a shiny new life in the West. In England, Milena finds the transition jarring. She and her now-husband live in bohemian conditions, and she struggles daily to grapple with the perplexing value systems held by her capitalist neighbors. Milena narrates the story somberly from some future vantage and alludes frequently to the misfortunes that await her. (“I had a momentary premonition that this story would not end well”; “I could not know yet that London would be a city of sorrows for me.”) Indeed, disillusionment and betrayal come, though all the anticipation might blunt the impact for some readers. The novel—which often reads as a Soviet-era reimagining of the Medea myth, in which a foreign woman uproots her life for love only to be met with treachery—is imbued with a certain fatalism. (Milena casts a shadow over her bid for independence right in the first chapter, when she asks, “How do you rebel when even your rebellion is anticipated?”) Fatalism notwithstanding, this is an absorbing novel marked by Goldsworthy's humor, intelligence, and talent for making the familiar strange.
A gripping tragedy about love and betrayal set near the end of the Cold War.
