Dumitru Radu Popa

Sabrina and Other Good Suspicions Dumitru Radu Popa

D. R. Popa's novel "Sabrina and Other Good Suspicions" is a thriller and a love story, together with incredible transoceanic happenings. Part of it is placed in the United States, while another part takes place in Romania after the 1989 Revolution. The author is a political refugee who brings a perspective full of doubts, suspicion, and uncertainty about the real democratization of his old country. Popa places his characters and actions in a world of fantastic and ironic threads, like in many other of his writings (see "Lady V. and Other Stories". New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2007). For example, the mythical Securitate (Romanian KGB, officially abolished after the controversial Revolution, is still present, over there as well as over here. Two Securitate officers are sent to recuperate money belonging to the organization in the U. S. where a traitor disappeared with the dough ... in the dream of another fellow! The action continues with a couple of old Americans taking, apparently, a peaceful vacation and reading "Sabrina and Other Good Suspicions", the book, which is in perpetual making. This is a good opportunity for the author to give a sample of the way Romania and Romanians are perceived in the Middle America. The very modern literary technique blends together elements of social observation with obsessions about the old country; but everything in the end, including the strange love story between an American young woman and a displaced Romanian man, remains under the spell of suspicion.