Under the Grip of Communism in Romania - an Editorial Review of "The Last Patient"

Book Blurb:

Honorable mention in the 2025 Readers' Favorite book awards. THE LAST PATIENT is a sweeping historical novel that captures one family’s struggle for love, survival, and identity under the grip of Communism in Romania. Spanning fifty years of political upheaval, this saga explores how ordinary lives are shaped—and sometimes shattered—by extraordinary times.

Kostea and Clara meet and fall in love shortly before World War II. As they get married, build careers, and raise a son, the world around them changes rapidly—and often violently. From the two-bedroom apartment they are “patriotically” forced to share with another family, to Bucharest’s rampant food shortages, Romania’s Cold War history plays out in their day-to-day lives.

Kostea, a charming yet domineering surgeon, craves control in a place where party loyalists hold the reins of power. His pursuit of respect and authority threatens his promising medical career and his relationships at home, risking Clara’s love. While the temptation to break through the Iron Curtain is omnipresent, defection to the West comes with its own uncertainties. Ultimately, The Last Patient is a poignant exploration of the eternal tension between personal aspirations and love.

Book Buy Link: https://geni.us/aqkat

Author Bio:

Alex Duvan, who publishes under the pen name Tudor Alexander, was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1950 and moved to the United States in 1977. He holds a Master’s degree from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest and an MBA from the University of Connecticut. Alex lives in Maryland with his wife, Viorica, and has a son, a daughter, and three grandchildren.

Alex started writing in high school, and enjoyed an early success, publishing many short stories in established literary magazines. Although writing was his passion, he studied engineering and management to support his family. After the 1989 Romanian revolution, he published several novels and short story collections in Romania, including The Runners, Smoke, Planet New York, One Morning and One Afternoon, and The Visitor.

Alex writes in both Romanian and English. He tells the story of immigrants struggling to adapt to a new country and a different culture, and finding the courage to overcome the fear of the unknown. They are people who, like the author, took a leap of faith to find political and intellectual freedom, despite the heartbreak of leaving friends and family behind. Was it worth it?

Planet New York was written in English and published by Xlibris in 2000 in the United States and then, in his translation, in Romania in 2001. In 2007 Planet New York received an Honorary Mention at the New York Book Fest.

His novel, No Portrait in the Gilded Frame, was published by CreateSpace in the summer of 2016. His latest novel, The Last Patient, was released by Boyle & Dalton in February 2025.

He is a member of the Maryland Writers Association and serves on the board of directors for the Little Patuxent Review, a biannual Maryland literary publication.

Currently, he is working on a new novel, titled In Black and White.

Editorial Review:

Title: The Last Patient

Author: Tudor Alexander

Rating: 4.5

Tudor Alexander’s "The Last Patient" is a masterful work of historical fiction that does not merely recount a family’s life under Romanian Communism but rather immerses the reader in the very texture of their struggle, their quiet triumphs and their moral compromises. Set against the bleak backdrop of the Ceausescu’s regime in Romania, the novel is both an intimate family portrait and a sweeping political drama, tracing the life of Comrade Kostea Bardu, a gifted surgeon, as he navigates loyalty, ambition, love, and survival.

The novel’s structural power is evident from its haunting prologue in 1993 Maryland, where an aged Kostea reads poetry to his dying wife, Clara. This frame which is a moment of tender, private reckoning, immediately establishes the emotional stakes and casts a retrospective shadow over everything that follows. We are not simply told that these characters endured, instead we are shown the cost of that endurance in the quiet of a sickroom, in the weight of a line of a verse.

"Kostea brought two mugs of tea and set them down on the coffee table near the bed...

Don’t fear dying, my dear

Beginnings and endings are one and are near

A short night untangles the engagement between us

Thereafter, death eternal together will bring us.

He set the book in his lap. “This will be our poem, Clara. We are together in this—just us. Two people without a title. Did you like it?” Her chest rattle continued."

This quiet opening scene sets the tone for the entire novel. Kostea reads a poem to his dying wife, Clara, moving from the formal words on the page to a simple, personal declaration: "This will be our poem... Two people without a title." This moment strips away all the roles and struggles of their life, and leaves only their core bond. But the unstopped rattle in her chest is a brutal reminder that love and poetry cannot silence the physical reality of death. It frames the whole story to come as a long journey back to this raw, intimate point, where all the grand titles of a life fall away, and only the quiet connection remains.

The novel truly finds its rhythm in the tense, claustrophobic scenes of 1950s Bucharest, where political terror infiltrates the most private spaces. A masterful early scene involves the forcible subdivision of Kostea and Clara’s apartment by the state, a bureaucratic violation that is both mundane and chilling. Here, the prose tightens, the dialogue becomes a tense negotiation loaded with unspoken threat.

“Comrade Bardu, your apartment has been subdivided,” the policeman informed Kostea, handing him an authorization with the emblem of the precinct. “These are Comrades Sorin and Marta Ionescu, and their five-year-old son, Radu. Your second bedroom was assigned to them, with access to your kitchen and bathroom.” Kostea paled. Haltingly, Clara had followed him, and he heard her breathing behind him. He turned and pointed at her rounded belly. “There must be a mistake. We need the space. We’re expecting a baby.”

The horror here is not in dramatic action, but in a procedural calm that is more terrifying than any violence. The sentence structure is simple, factual, and utterly final: "Your second bedroom was assigned to them," there is no argument, only execution, transforming a deeply personal violation into a cold administrative fact. The state's power is shown not through a shouting soldier, but through an official wielding a piece of paper. Kostea's reaction and his desperate, physical gesture toward Clara's belly highlight the shocking disconnect between the human reality and the regime's impersonal machinery. The true terror lies in the understanding that there is no one to appeal to.

Alexander excels at rendering psychological complexity, particularly in Kostea, a man torn between his desire for professional excellence and the compromises required to protect his family. His internal struggle over joining the Communist Party is rendered not as a simple moral dilemma, but as a survival calculation fraught with fear and shame. The scene of his Party admission hearing is a tour de force of suspense, where the grammar shifts from Kostea’s solitary anxiety to the cold formalism of the proceedings, and finally to the last-minute arrival of his friend Marin, a Party operative. The dialogue here is a sharp instrument, revealing power dynamics and unspoken alliances:

“Comrades, we now understand that religion is the opiate of the masses. But that doesn’t mean that we can eradicate the past by chopping it off with a hatchet. On the contrary, we need to be sensitive and understanding, like Comrade Bardu. Don’t blame him for being human! Comrade Bardu saved my life during the war. I’ve known him ever since, and I can tell you that he is hardworking, competent, and loyal—in other words, exactly the type of person our Party should accept without hesitation. Let’s cast our votes in his favor.”

This speech is a masterpiece of political maneuvering, performing ideological purity while arguing for pragmatic exception. The structural power lies in this orchestrated rescue, which saves Kostea professionally but implicates him morally, binding him closer to the system he needs to navigate.

"The Last Patient" is a significant and deeply moving novel that has been written with the clarity of a historian and the empathy of a novelist, bringing to life an era of fear and scarcity without ever losing sight of the individuals who loved, hoped, and compromised within it. It is a story about immigration, yes, but more fundamentally, it is a story about "home" specifically what we sacrifice to preserve it, what we lose when we leave it, and what, in the end, we truly mean when we say that word. For readers seeking a compelling, intelligent, and profoundly human story that illuminates history through the lens of one unforgettable family, this is an essential and unforgettable read.

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