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Everyone had a friend in every wisp of cloud
that’s how it is with friends where the world is full of fear
even my mother said, that’s how it is
friends are out of the question
think of more serious things.

Did you ever feel ashamed for taking pleasure in a book? The title “The Land of Green Plums�� and even the cover illustration are (at first) dreamy. The prose is original, austere, and poetic �� yet also somehow dreamy, surreal like a Russell Edson prose poem. The effect is a terror that sneaks up, builds like slow poison, like the green plums that grow everywhere in Romania, whose soft, edible pits contain a toxin. Children eat the plums despite their mothers�� warnings, and the young men who crave jobs as police officers, their only opportunity for any kind of power, are constantly stealing them out of gardens and stuffing their faces with them. In truth I didn't take pleasure for long, but the book is a work of art, and worth reading.

I found myself reading and re-reading to glean meanings from the indirect, subtle text that mirrors the indirection necessary under the dictatorship. Some aspects (maybe cultural?) remain a mystery to me. But also I dragged my feet, I didn’t want to read what might come next. The biggest mystery was what had these students �� or any of the other countless victims of the regime �� done to deserve to be terrorized and sometimes murdered or driven to suicide? In short, nothing. It wasn’t what they did or did not do, it was the pleasure those in power took in abuse, control, manipulation, torment, destruction.