Where rivers of milk and honey flow, Vladimir Lorcenkov from Alina Travel's blog

​Today I want to talk about the book of a Bessarabian, journalist, writer in Russian, Vladimir Lorcenkov: "Where rivers of milk and honey flow" the title in Romanian, "Vse tam budem" - the original title, and "Des mille et une façons de quitter la Moldavie" - the title in French, and other titles, because this book has been translated into 10 languages.

I discovered it in 2015 (even if it is from 2006), in a bookstore in France.  At that time, we organized Moldovan-French cultural evenings, and the presentation of a book written by a Moldovan, translated into French, seemed to us a good idea. Okay, I didn't know what the book was about. In the end, the person who was supposed to come to present the book at the event didn't come, and I bought it from the bookstore and started reading it.

I read it hard, with long reading breaks, and I must admit that at first I was angry with the author for the style in which he presented Moldova, I was glad that the representative did not come to that event, because what we were doing then - the investment of all our resources for promoting a positive image of the country, and a book that recounts the drama of a people trying to escape from where it was born, were somehow contradictory.
I finished reading it this year, and I have to admit that I don't regret coming back to it. When we read a book, its perception depends a lot on our mood (and it's not just about books).

Lorcenkov describes with humor and fantasy the tragedy of the 2000s: the desire to go to Italy, for a better life, "where rivers of milk and honey flow...". The action takes place in the village of Larga, where every citizen dreams of escaping, and this dream of everyone awakens the villagers' imagination to the maximum, until they transform a tractor into a flying one or a submarine.

The author tells about illegal human trafficking schemes, people who borrowed money to leave and were lied to, people who ended their lives because of this. The chapter in which Maria hanged herself hurt me the most, and the fact that the neighbors and her husband, Vasilii, saw her, but no one jumped to save her, as she imagined, and that she was hanged for 3 weeks in the garden, because Vasilii forgot about the trouble of debts when he saw his body in the wind... How I wish that in this case the author had had to invent...

A novel in which even Voronin, then president , escaped from the country he was leading to work illegally in Italy.

Have you read it? What were your impressions?