Book Review: Romance Language

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the violent revolution that ended Nicolae Ceauºescu’s cruel dictatorship in Romania, journalist Alan Elsner has captured those dramatic events in his new novel Romance Language.

Elsner was State Department correspondent for Reuters News Service in 1989. He traveled with U.S. Secretary of State James Baker to Berlin, Prague, Moscow and Bucharest and was present during tense negotiations and dramatic street events.

His 30-year career with Reuters has included stints in Jerusalem, London, Stockholm and Washington. Former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb) said, “Alan Elsner is a world class reporter with a deep reservoir of experience and ability who understands the craft of writing and selling a story.” In 2007, Elsner was a Knight International Journalism Fellow in Romania where he advanced the cause of a free media in an emerging democracy.

Elsner’s first book, Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America’s Prisons won wide praise as a dramatic exposé of appalling neglect and abuse in the nation’s jails. The late Sen. Edward Kennedy said: “Elsner makes an overwhelming case for reform, and his many sensible proposals deserve to be implemented. This book should be a wake-up call for federal, state, and local governments across America.”

In 2007, Publisher’s Weekly called Elsner’s first novel, The Nazi Hunter, “a gripping debut thriller” while Library Journal said it “chimes with the bells and whistles of a thriller while tracing the honest emotions of its appealingly sincere characters."

Part love story, part historical drama, part coming-of-age novel, Romance Language begins in 2007 as 17-year-old Petra O'Neill runs off from college and shows up in far-away Romania on a quest to find the father she's never known and uncover the tumultuous events that led to her birth.

We flash back to 1989. Petra's mother Liz, an experienced magazine writer, is assigned to write an expose of Europe's most brutal Communist regime. She discovers in Romania a half-starved nation cowering under the heel of a cruel, paranoid dictatorship.

Liz meets Stefan Petrescu, a dissident poet, one of the few with the courage to defy the regime. But in Ceausescu's Romania, it is a serious crime for a citizen even to talk to a foreigner and the secret police are constantly watching.

As the action swings between 1989 and 2007, we follow Petra through her own, first love and Liz, caught at the center of a revolution that has turned the capital into a deadly battlefield.

The publisher is Portals Press, a small literary publisher in New Orleans, devoted to bringing out poetry, novels and short stories of exceptional literary merit. A statement from Portals offers this assessment: “Meticulously researched and based on numerous eye-witness interviews, Romance Language is also a meditation on the power and limitations of language and literature.”