Honestly I have never really liked the novella format if i’m going to be completely honest. It’s like the 400M of reading not short enough to sprint through, and have that very concise punch that short stories do, yet not long enough to have the depth an exploration of the ideas presented. For all that I actually quite liked The Trenchcoat. To me the best part of this whole novella was the tone and the atmosphere of a cold war era Romania. I guess that it’s interesting in itself that I as a child of the 2000’s are instantly drawn not the recent and very real suffering of Soviet bloc countries in this era but rather the aesthetic of totalitarianism . These events happened in the course of lifetimes that are still being lived yet it feels as far away as castles and knights. Just some food for thought on the speed of history. But not only the paranoia and constraint of a police state but also the pure tiredness of a system that keeps people on constant watch. There is a paradoxical feel to the entirety of the narrative that stems from these contradictory pillars of society. Everyone is just so tired with their current lives that even the secret police are said to be “just going through the motions”. An entire people struck with apathy, just continuing. Yet these same people are also faced with an oppressive and authoritarian state. It just doesn’t line up yet is fascinating in its own rights. The main conflict of the novel revolves around a dinner party and a leftover trench coat. Honestly i’m still not entirely sure what was going on with the plot of this novel. The trench coat obviously has some meaning or message as it could have been left by secret police. It’s all shrouded in the deep mystery of subversive politics, there are constant omissions to the dialogue and even the trenchcoat itself is meant to possibly be a reference to some forbidden text or writer. Yet there are no real specifics, I assume we are supposed to infer throughout that there is something clandestine about this interaction. Yet at the very end of all it seems to me that she was just frankly bored with her life and wanted a change. Leading me to question what was the point of all of the text before this. Was it in essence to prove that authoritarianism can only function with our active ferver and paranoia? Perhaps it’s just a look into the strange paradox of a post authoritarian country like I mentioned earlier? Maybe I just missed something?