The Fortress

July 18, 2016
At one point in this memoir, Trussoni (Falling Through the Earth) finds herself pregnant and on extended bed rest in a hospital in Bulgaria, speaking no Bulgarian. Filled with incidents like this, Trussoni’s is a memoirist’s dream life, ripe for storytelling, and she’s an expert at it. As the story begins, she is a single mother dating a Bulgarian author on a visa visit to the U.S. He is sensitive, brilliant, and appealingly eccentric; he is also duplicitous, but she doesn’t like thinking about that. His visa expires and he sells her on the romance of a quick trip to Bulgaria to get it renewed; the visa requires, he fails to mention, that he stay in Bulgaria for two years. Startled, but still game, she marries him and has a daughter. More deceptions follow, and in an unconventional bid to save her failing marriage, she moves the family to a medieval fortress in a French village. Her husband becomes unbalanced, installing locks on the interior doors of their house and carving Tibetan symbols for death on his office door, yet he accuses her of suffering from mental illness. His gall draws her into a gutter fight to extract herself and her children. It’s a powerful story, and she has the fortitude and the judgment to do it justice.

April 1, 2016

After two New York Times best-selling novels, the unearthly Angelology and Angelopolis, Trussoni returns to memoir territory, which she first trod in Falling Through the Earth, a 2006 New York Times Best Book. Here she explains how she met and quickly fell for Bulgarian American novelist Nikolai Grozni (Wunderkind). Eight years later, they repaired to a 13th-century fortress built by the Knights Templar in the Languedoc, France, with the hopes of healing their marriage. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2016
A handsome prince turns into an ogre in a memoir that reads like a fairy tale.When she was 27, novelist and memoirist Trussoni (Angelopolis, 2013, etc.), married with a 1-year-old son, met Nikolai, a mesmerizing Bulgarian "with an aura of invincibility about him." As she confesses, "I was a woman ready to be swept away." Nikolai, she told her dismayed husband, was "a magician who would make all my dreams come true." At first blinded by his exoticism, Trussoni gradually realized that Nikolai was no hero, although he was so mired in superstition (evil eyes, mantras, and hexes) that he fit the description of a magician. Their marriage began to fall apart, and after 8 years and the failure of couples therapy, the author decided they must move "far away from everything--far from successes and troubles," to a village in the south of France, where, she hoped, they could protect their "fragile love." Installed in a medieval fortress, Nikolai became increasingly moody, withdrawn, and erratic. A friend, who plied him with herbal remedies, suggested a weekend getaway. When that turned sour, Trussoni decided to stage an elaborate renewal ceremony, but Nikolai had a near-breakdown during the ritual. The author devotes much of the narrative to reconstructing Nikolai's long rants, but she offers little insight about her own insecurities and delusions. She consulted an astrologer, who told her that her soul yearned for "authentic love," which would require "growing through hell." Enter a gorgeous young Frenchman, with whom Trussoni began an affair, inciting Nikolai to desperate measures. The author is an engaging storyteller, but her memoir is weakened by cliches (a resident ghost, the princess locked in the castle) and stock characters, including a fairy godmother (her lover's chic mother) who rescued her. Back in the United States, Trussoni eventually came to the trite conclusion that she could not sustain a relationship until she learned how "to be a singular person" who could be "happy alone first." An entertaining but too predictable tale.

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