Mapped
The Forest of the Hanged
Liviu Rebreanu
Apostol Bologa, a Romanian officer in the Austro-Hungarian army of the First World War, sits on the court-martial that hangs a Czech deserter, and is then ordered to the Transylvanian front to fight against his fellow Romanians, until conscience and divided loyalty tear him apart. Rebreanu sets it between the far Galician front where the hangings begin and Bologa's Transylvanian homeland: his home village near Năsăud, the border front against Romania, and the forest where he too will hang.
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The Land of Green Plums
Herta Müller
Müller's Romania is the Banat under Ceaușescu, where four young ethnic-German friends leave a German-speaking farming village for the city to study, and the Securitate follows them into lecture halls, the student hostel, the factories they are posted to and the interrogation rooms. The map runs from the village on the Timiș plain to Timișoara's centre and university, then reaches east to the capital and out of the country to exile.
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