A plethora of disconnected, flat characters and a mishmash of plot elements made this book a pain to read. I didn't have a good time. 

We follow the Dean, who is travelling from Chicago, US, to Bucharest, Romania, to support his wife as her mother is living through her last days. At the same time, another plot line follows the death of one of the Dean's students, the factors that may have contributed to it, and who might have been at fault. 

The multiple plotlines were very confusing here, the chronology would intersect to the point that it wasn't clear what is a memory and what is happening at the same time. It wasn't quite as dreamy or eerie that I'd describe it as intentionally messing with the reader, more unstructured and unplanned. There were also so many characters that it was difficult to follow who's who, they weren't given sufficient focus, and the only thing that registered with me were their names.

The geographical distribution, paired with the 80s, made for a huge possibility for comparing and contrasting Communist Romania with capitalist US. Unfortunately the ideas, just as the characters, remained superficial. Having read Petru Popescu for example would deliver much more sensitively and broadly on the Romanian experience during those times, from the political setup to life for the everyday person. Bellow, in turn, focused on corruption and hierarchy, but failed to deliver a complete picture and only scraped the surface. From the names being written incorrectly (such as 'Ioanna' instead of 'Ioana' which you can guess particularly irked me), to what seemed like unfulfilled research, it disappointed severely. 

If you'd like to understand more about the recent history of Romania - Mihail Sebastian is fantastic for the beginning of the 20th century, and Petru Popescu for time during Communism.