Member-only story
Around the World in Books / Romania (2 Books)
Inside One Of The World’s Most Notorious Dictatorships
A journalist suspects someone is spying on him on a bike trip, and a Nobel Prize–winner’s heroine fears Romania’s secret police
This is the 22d post in the “Around the World in Books” series that is reviewing 30 books about 30 countries in the first 30 days of March. Tomorrow: Russia
On Christmas Day in 1989, a military firing squad executed the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena, for atrocities they had been committing brazenly for years. So it wasn’t surprising that Brian Hall kept hearing two words of advice before he set out on a post-college bike trip through Romania in the early 1980s: “Don’t go.”
Nervous but undeterred, the young journalist pressed on with a trip he recalls his engaging memoir, Stealing From a Deep Place: Travels in Southeastern Europe (FSG, 1988). Hall faced his first potential setback the moment he tried to enter Romania. A customs official flipped through his copy of Absalom, Absalom! and demanded to know if he was carrying a Bible.
“It’s very bad to bring a Bible into Romania, mister,” the man said. Very bad. You get in big trouble.” The man turned to…
