Liliana Corobca’s Kinderland is the story of three children in contemporary Moldova whose parents have gone abroad to work. The novel opens with the middle child, Dan, crying because there’s a tick on his stomach. His sister, Cristina, who narrates the book, doesn’t know how to remove it and so she goes out into the street, asking for help. We at once get a sense of the precariousness of their existence, the dangers that surround them. Cristina is 12 when Kinderland begins, Dan is six and Marcel a toddler. Cristina looks after not just her brothers, but also the pig, dog, cat and chickens that the family depend upon.
The book is structured without chapters, nor with any strong sense of narrative progression; rather, it works by accretion, taking us into the small moments of sublimity and loss that make up Cristina’s life. We learn that the family’s father is in Siberia, the mother working as a nanny in Italy. “Mom said she’d go for a year or two, until Dad pays off his debts. Then she left, and that year or two never seems to end.” We understand that the children’s situation is symptomatic of a deep malaise in this forgotten corner of rural destitution. Everyone is leaving: for the capital, Chişinău, for “long money” abroad, for other villages – even the priests are going to “other villages where people were stupider and more willing to give them money”. Those who stay drink, argue and beat their children. Whenever her brothers miss their father, Cristina takes them to watch a dad who has stayed as he drunkenly lays into his children: it’s a bleak existence redeemed by the narrator’s tenderness and resourcefulness. “Hold up your heart with just the tips of your fingers and blow on it hard, until it flies away to Mom,” she tells her brothers.
Kinderland is not just an extraordinary look at life in Europe’s edgelands (“our poor and unhappy country”) – it’s also a powerful novel, full of surprising imagery and beautiful writing. This is Corobca’s second work to be translated into English and immediately sent me in search of her first, The Censor’s Notebook, which takes place in Romania, where the author now lives. Both are exquisitely translated by Monica Cure, who renders Cristina’s naive hopefulness and humour with nimble deftness.
• Kinderland by Liliana Corobca (translated by Monica Cure) is published by Seven Stories Press (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
