The Good Life Elsewhere by Vladimir Lorchenkov

"We're gonna make it to Italy. Everything'll change," said Serafim. "There'll be no more Moldovan mud in our lives, no more terrible poverty hanging over our heads like a scab on a bald tramp's noggin. No more of this interminable, hellish work, which makes you want to howl louder than a dog on the doorstep o fa penny-pinching priest."

The dream of everyone in Moldova, Europe's poorest country, seems to be to move to Italy, where work, one hears, is plentiful. Of course, dreaming is one thing, and doing is another. In a town called Larga, the citizens hatch a number of wild schemes, led by one Serafim: they pretend to be a curling team, en route to a tournament in Italy, but the driver who takes their money simply drives them around Moldova before dropping them off in Chisinau, pretending it's Rome. They build an airplane, then a submarine, out of the remnants of an old tractor, but in each case are turned back by the Italian armed forces. Even the president of Moldova gets in on the action, faking a plane crash on an Italian mountainside so that he can sneak into the country and take up the more desirable life of a migrant worker. But through all this, Italy remains a dream, a kind of symbolic Eden always just beyond the schemers' reach.

Eden, paradise, heaven--these words are not hyperbole. So strong is the image of Italy in the mind of the Moldovans that Larga's priest gins up a crusade to bring the faithful to the Italian promised land. When it doesn't work, he tries again with a children's crusade, just like the real crusades. The belief in Italy is so strong that it generates equally strong naysayers: one of the village's old men insists that Italy is, in fact, a myth, and doesn't really exist. For this heresy he is tortured and killed. In this way, author Vladimir Lorchenkov takes the dream of immigration to its most absurd extremes, turning The Good Life Elsewhere into a shaggy dog-satire that reminded me of some of the work of Bohumil Hrabal. The book is extremely dark--one of the first thing that happens is that the wife of one of the protagonist hangs herself from a tree as apology for the failed curling team scheme--but profoundly funny, and illuminating of a part of Europe that is typically forgotten, if not ignored completely.

With the addition of Moldova, my "Countries Read" list is up to 119!