GENERAL & LITERARY FICTION. The author-narrator, a sarcastic Romanian emigre with a French wife, tells with great insight and humor the story of a young student's life and education as he passes from post-Ceausescu Romania through an unwelcoming Western Europe beset with dangerous problems of its own. Sex-and drug-traffickers are only one part of the strange and paranoid world in which the student and his fellow-countrymen become entangled, while the author's past-in the form of post-communist gangsters-begins to catch up with him in his retreat in rural France.