Writer's Bloc

What a Serbian British novelist makes of her homelands.

- By Thomas Mallon

Vesna Goldsworthy’s life and work have involved multiple migrations: from Belgrade to London; from writing in Serbian to writing in English; from literary scholarship to memoir to poetry and then to the novel. To that last genre, she has now contributed three books, and the latest, “Iron Curtain: A Love Story” (Norton), is yet another departure, from skillful contrivance to full-throated voice.

The emotions of this well-conjured novel are raw, its observations acute. Goldsworthy is so intent on getting where she wants to go that, from the book’s earliest pages, she repeatedly—and artfully—telegraphs its bitter ending, thereby freeing a reviewer from the need to issue any spoiler alerts. (The first epigraph comes from “Medea”: “Stronger than lover’s love is lover’s hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.”)

The book’s prologue is set in December, 1990. Milena Urbanska watches the husband she’s left make a puffed-up speech on TV accepting a poetry prize in the reunified Germany, heralding the “end of history.” Milena, forceful and self-centered, is the privileged daughter of the Vice-President of an unnamed and staunchly oppressive Eastern Bloc country. The book’s main action, splendidly paced, begins nine years earlier, in 1981, when Milena’s equally élite boy-friend, Misha, kills himself in a game of Russian roulette. A coverup of the circumstances doesn’t completely extinguish sex-and-drugs-and-conspiracy rumors about the participation of Misha’s friends, so Milena keeps her head down, taking a dull job translating maize-production reports. But she tempts fate by agreeing to attend a literary festival to translate for Jason Connor, a young Anglo-Irish poet.