She builds her story with wonderfully evocative detail, and as Milena moves from the wary conformity of her homeland to England, bubbles of humour burst through Goldsworthy’s bittersweet brew ... If Iron Curtain is often pessimistic about its lonely heroine’s world, this is no classical tragedy. The pages fly by, and Goldsworthy’s careful scrutiny brings warmth and sympathy to her tale of belonging and betrayal. Tense, brooding and often hilarious, Iron Curtain finds bright sparks as well as bleakness in the cold war’s dying embers.
Iron Curtain is Goldsworthy’s finest novel so far, a brilliantly written and often witty exploration of its protagonist’s predicament, caught as she is between two worlds, happy in neither, and seeking a freedom to live and love that always eludes her.
The emotions of this well-conjured novel are raw, its observations acute. Goldsworthy is so intent on getting where she wants to go that, from the book’s earliest pages, she repeatedly—and artfully—telegraphs its bitter ending ... Goldsworthy has constructed a sharply etched, more repressive variant of the Yugoslavia where she grew up ... This wholly satisfying novel winds up being about personal, not political, disloyalty, but the character drama is thrown into high relief against all the First and Second World-building that the author carries out ... By casting aside the traces of literary dependence and making Iron Curtain fully Milena’s story, Goldsworthy allows her protagonist to be what’s at stake.
The irony of finding families, governments, and other institutions crumbling on both sides of the iron curtain and the Cold War propels this unusual, cutting, thought-provoking novel.
The novel—which often reads as a Soviet-era reimagining of the Medea myth, in which a foreign woman uproots her life for love only to be met with treachery—is imbued with a certain fatalism ... This is an absorbing novel marked by Goldsworthy's humor, intelligence, and talent for making the familiar strange.
A witty and perceptive novel of love in the twilight of the Soviet Union ... Goldsworthy’s perceptive and well-crafted story plays like The Americans as revised by Sally Rooney, with acidic observations worthy of the late Kingsley Amis. By flipping the Cold War script, Goldsworthy comes up with a winner.
