Excerpts of reviews on the novel Montana

MIRCEA V. CIOBANU, literary critic, writer, essayist, poet and literary historian from Chișinău. A review published in Viața românească, a Romanian literary magazine.
”The author conquered me with his cursive, undulating sentences, without the visible ordeals of the work, as it happens with other young Bessarabian writers of literature (and, sometimes, with the older ones) that are still in a state of struggle with the Romanian language and literature. The lightness of creation of fictional universes in relation to the intermittent babbling about the reproduction of pre-existing realities is simply explained: entire libraries have been written about the world of fiction, and the narrator applies not so much a life experience as a reading experience.
Alexandru Popescu’s novel is a precious source to feel the atmosphere of a reality as authentic as it is unimaginable, of a concentration camp universe, located (today!) next to us, close to the heart of Europe, which follows us like a train of a dress, no matter how much we slip on the comfortable slope of civilization.”

EUGEN LUNGU, literary critic, essayist and book editor from Moldova. A review published in Limba română, a literary magazine in Chișinău.
”The novel Montana makes us witness a strong debut, such as we haven’t had for a long time in our literature. The surprise is doubled by the fact that the prose is written by a young man who is completely unknown here, as it comes from a new geographical (but also narrative!) perspective – the author of the book, Alexandru Popescu, has been settled in the UK for several years. It is not surprising, therefore, that a good part of the subject matter of the book brings realities and characters from England into the epic space, although all the thoughts, agitation and anxieties of Ivan Josan, the protagonist of the book, are focused on his country of origin, the Republic of Moldova, and in particular on his native town of Bender, where his mother, who is ill, is still living.
We have in Montana perhaps the most serious and truthful prose about the enclave called Transnistria. In this Mesozoic backwardness, time has frozen, preserving in its sociopolitical glaciation the Soviet realities that we have already begun to forget. The narrative reopens a bloody wound of history still unhealed, reflecting a far from dystopian space in which poverty, violence, hatred, brutality, anti-Romanianism sentiments and so on, are the unrelenting domination of man, reducing him to the humiliation of a slave.
The novel seems to have been written by a hand with full and consummate epic dexterity, which is astonishing in a debut novelist! The prose is well-structured, its architecture seems flawless, without cracks, the episodes in the two story lines are supported in the overall fable and complement each other like a narrative puzzle in which the pieces fit together perfectly.”

Doina Ioanid, poet and translator from Bucharest. A review for the Romanian literary magazine Observator cultural.
”The author knows how to build his characters, to round them gradually, with new attributes and new events. He knows how to create an absolutely memorable atmosphere. The novel is very concrete and visual. The protagonist, Ivan, narrates what has happened to him and what is happening to him with finesse and great plasticity. He scrutinizes himself without sugarcoating, without lament, with a kind of detachment. The dramatic situations lived in that Transnistrian enclave, as if still trapped in Soviet times, are described simply and intensely, very subtly, never discursive, never overbearing, with details of great impact on the reader.
Alexandru Popescu builds a vivid, very present fictional world, which shifts from a tragic realism into a magical one and, at times, takes on the dimensions of a nightmarish dystopia. Montana is an excellent debut novel, admirably paced, no excesses, no bloat, a gripping and profound novel that I read in just a few hours. In fact, if it didn’t say on the back cover that it was a debut novel, you could have sworn it was the novel of a well-established author.”

Vasile Ernu, writer. A review published in Libertatea, a Romanian daily newspaper.
”This novel is top-notch. I rarely recommend debuts or beginners because it’s not my job. But when something convinces me, I necessarily do it with pleasure and even joy. There is a new generation of writers coming from “beyond” who have a totally different experience from us, those from “the soviets” – they are the children of the transition of terrible violence, which left huge traumas and a certain kind of sensibility. Basically, it’s what I keep saying about the “new sensibility” – it’s very different from their parents’ and ours, the older ones, produced in stable and secure systems. In this book we have a string of identities, transformations, loves, war, separations and reunions on the Transnistria- Republic of Moldova- UK route. The child’s dream was just a Montana electronic wristwatch that plays tunes.”

Iulian Ciocan, writer. A review published in Limba română, a literary magazine in Chișinău.
”The novel Montana by Alexandru Popescu seems to me, and I am not trying to exaggerate, one of the memorable prose debuts of the last decade in the Republic of Moldova. It is perhaps the most brilliant debut. A dense novel, without annoying digressions, well-written, built on two temporal planes that interact harmoniously: on the one hand, we have the story of a child from a somewhat isolated place in Bender, a “base” with wagons and assembly lines, which after perestroika finds itself on the territory of a self-proclaimed state, Transnistria, and on the other hand, it is the story of that child turned journalist in modern-day London, a journalist who has escaped the gray quasi-Soviet universe of Bender, but who is having a hard time adapting to the Western lifestyle and taboos.
There is a lot of drama in the novel, but it is well dosed, the narrator’s voice is calm, leaving the reader to feel the tension of situations. There are disturbing situations described with great finesse, in the style of the great writers, such as, for example, the sinuous love affair with Ana. We are dealing, I repeat, with an excellent debut, perhaps our best in recent years.”