7/29/2023 0 Comments Elsewhere book![]() ![]() After all, it was thanks to him they’d been able to extract themselves from the swamp at the end of a small and dirty river, where they’d been dumped by the runners smuggling them into Italy. He was nearly guilty of the sin of pride. Serafim looked around at his fellow travelers. In comparison to toiling on the land, what wasn’t a breeze? And for the women, there was work cleaning house for wealthy Italians – to whom, with a bit of luck, they might even end up getting hitched. Which meant, in front of them was breezy work in construction ort he like. They’d left behind the poverty, the Moldovan devastation, the repellent earth that, no matter which way you worked it, when you planted corn you reaped just the husks. They’d left behind Larga, their village in Moldova. Just like it used to be, like it was in their childhoods. Finally, life had become clear and simple. They were standing in a little grove on a hill beside the capital of capitals, Rome herself, and none of them could believe what was happening. ![]() Buildings of white stone were just as blinding as the joy Serafim and his forty-five fellow travelers-Moldovans all-were feeling. Serafim Botezatu narrowed his eyes and blinked, but the city spreading out beneath him in the valleys between the hills didn’t disappear. But, as Lorchenkov vividly shows, it’s a country whose residents don’t easily give up. A country where 25 percent of its population works abroad, where remittances make up nearly 40 percent of the GDP, where alcohol consumption per capita is the highest in the world, and which has the lowest per capita income in all of Europe-this is a country that surely has its problems. It is not often that stories from forgotten countries such as Moldova reach us in the English-speaking world. Like many great satirists from Voltaire to Gogol to Vonnegut, Lorchenkov makes use of the grotesque to both horrify us and help us laugh. This is a book with wild imagination and heartbreaking honesty, grim appraisals alongside optimistic commentary about the nature of human striving. Moldovan writer Vladimir Lorchenkov tells the story of a group of villagers and their tragicomic efforts, against all odds and at any cost, to emigrate from Europe’s most impoverished nation to Italy for work. The Good Life Elsewhere is a very funny book.
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