30 November 2018

Make the Most of Your Time on Earth, by James Smart (ed.)


With the strapline ‘1000 ultimate travel experiences’, the second edition (2012) of the Rough Guide compilation Make the Most of Your Time on Earth: The Rough Guide to the World consists of personal recommendations contributed by Rough Guide authors.  Each entry is a couple of paragraphs, with a link to brief further information.

There are four entries relating to Romania: ‘Tracking carnivores (i.e. wolves and bears) in the Carpathian mountains’; ‘Journeying to the end of the Danube’; ‘Riding on horseback through snow in Transylvania’ (a somewhat waffly entry, perhaps because there is not much to write about riding a horse in the snow, even in such beautiful surroundings); and the outstandingly predictable ‘On the Dracula trail in Transylvania’.

There is also an entry for Moldova, ‘Nightclubbing back in the (old) USSR’; it makes the valid point that Moldova does not have a reputation as an oasis of hedonism.  The writer did find some nightlife though at the Military Pub in Chisinau, notable for having an ex-Soviet tank in the middle of the dance floor to house the DJ.  As far as I can tell the place no longer exists, which is a great shame.

Such a volume has to be subjective, and a travel experience one particular type of reader will love is going to leave another one cold.  Whatever type of trip one favours, it is easy to agree with the aim expressed here of moving beyond the familiar, even if in the age of mass mobility it is increasingly difficult to find ‘authentic’ experiences, and these suggestions only patchily fulfill that aim.

28 November 2018

The Legend and Romance of the Vampire, by Derek Hall (2010)


Derek Hall’s superficial examination of the vampire, aimed primarily at the teenage market, has a chapter on Vlad Țepeș and another on Transylvania, which despite being crassly titled ‘Land of the Vampire’ expands on the region’s folklore.  The book is nicely illustrated with some very attractive photographs that will delight the Romanian tourist board.  The text, however, while it is useful background for anyone whose ideas of the historical Vlad and of Transylvania come from films and mass-market novels, does not delve particularly deeply and is at times simplistic when dealing with the complex historical material.

23 November 2018

European Stories: EUPL Winners Write Europe


European Stories: EUPL Winners Write Europe is an anthology of short stories by winners of the European Union Prize for Literature (EUPL) published in 2018 and available free online.  In the foreword, ‘Writing Europe – how literature helps us build communities’, Tibor Navracsics, European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, says:

‘Europe’s cultural and linguistic diversity is a tremendous asset. Yet, this diversity makes it difficult for cultural works to circulate across borders, and this is especially true for literature. This is why, in 2009, the European Commission decided to launch the European Union Prize for Literature to support outstanding works of fiction by new and emerging authors writing in their national languages. In the past nine editions, we have recognised 108 talented authors from 37 different countries. We are very proud to have such a great number of excellent laureates, who represent Europe in their diversity.

‘2018 is a very special year: we are celebrating the European Year of Cultural Heritage, as well as the tenth anniversary of the European Union Prize for Literature. To mark this occasion, we organised a specific contest “A European Story: European Union Prize for Literature Winners Write Europe”. This is a unique competition for short works of fiction, exclusively open to previous winners of the prize, to celebrate the wealth and creativity of Europe’s contemporary literature.’

Of these winners, 36 from 26 countries, writing in 23 languages, entered.  All the submitted stories are presented in the original language and in English translation. Short biographies of the writers preface their contributions.  There are two Romanian writers in the anthology.  Claudiu Florian’s first novel, Vârstele jocului. Strada Cetăţii, won the EUPL in 2016.  His story ‘The Inheritance’ (‘Die Erbschaft’) included here is in German (he is Director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Berlin).  Ioana Pârvulescu won the EUPL in 2013 for her novel Life Begins on Friday (Viaţa începe vineri).  She is represented by her short story ‘A Voice’ (‘O voce’).

‘The Inheritance’ recounts a meeting in the mountains near the Carpathian Sphinx between Adamovicescu, a Romanian lecturer who is working on a system of philosophical thought called kaputmunditism, and what at first appears to be an alien.  However, by the end it would seem (if I have figured this out correctly) the creature is actually the grandchild of the mythological Pasiphae, who gave birth to the Minotaur on Crete. 

As Adamovicescu had had a stroke (his background is full of improbabilities and his four alleged doctorates were acquired with ludicrous ease), it is possible he is an unreliable narrator.  Most of the story is taken up by a dialogue in which he tries to explain life on earth to the visitor but only manages to confuse the situation by his incoherence.  The story concludes on a cliffhanger with ‘To be continued’, but hopefully that is a joke.

‘A Voice’ is a beautifully structured story about a homecoming.  A young woman at a passport control booth in an eastern European airport is processing passengers who have just arrived on an aeroplane from Paris.  Since the December 1989 revolution, the flights coming in from western Europe have been full and passengers are dealt with on autopilot by the overstretched staff.  One elderly lady proffers her passport, but when she speaks, the passport controller is overcome with emotion, rushes out and hugs the newcomer, even though she has never seen her before.   The scene shifts to 1947 and a young woman is trying to get into American-controlled Austria en route to Paris.  Despite having valid documentation she is put off the train, and only manages to complete the journey after much difficulty.

The third section, 44 years later, switches to a first person narrative and the same woman and her husband fly eastwards from Orly.  In exile she had worked for Radio Free Europe, broadcasting to her home country despite physical violence towards her and the murder of her mother, giving hope to those suffering from its repression.  Now at last she is free to return.  At passport control she proffers her passport and says “Good evening, Miss!” , whereupon the young woman in the booth comes round to hug her hard.  “I am crying like a fool because only now do I realise that we’re actually free,” she says.

There is another story in the volume, by Macedonian Lidija Dimkovska, dealing partly with Romania, at least obliquely.  ‘When I left “Karl Liebknecht”’ (‘Кога заминав од „Карл Либкнехт“’) consists of a series of short statements ostensibly by individuals gathered for a meeting organised by the Society of Admirers of Karl Liebknecht at Karl Liebknecht House in Leipzig.  All had emigrated from their countries of birth, and had lived at an address associated with the name Karl Liebknecht prior to emigration.

The first concerns Vitalie who had grown up in a house on Karl Liebknecht Street in Tiraspol, Transnistria.  One afternoon in 2006 he was on a trolleybus in the city when a bomb exploded.  He moved to Bucharest, and his father advised him to forget Transnistria and present himself as coming from Moldova.  When his father died he brought his mother to Bucharest but while he uses Latin script his mother struggles because she is used to Cyrillic, and he finds himself using it as well when jotting shopping lists, his sole legacy from Tiraspol.  Sometimes he misses the Dniester, he says, and feels Romania is a foreign country to which they have to adjust.

1 November 2018

Gaudeamus, by Mircea Eliade


Mircea Eliade (1907-86) wrote Gaudeamus (‘let us rejoice’) in 1928, but it was not published until 1986; only a three-page extract had appeared in 1928.  It has now (2018) been published in an English translation by Istros Books, which specialises in Balkan literature.  The text has been translated by Christopher Bartholomew with an informative introduction by Bryan Rennie and a lengthy afterword by Eliade’s nephew, Sorin Alexandrescu, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth, who is probably the most prolific translator of Romanian literature into English.

A portrait of Eliade’s student life, Gaudeamus is a sequel to his Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent (Romanul adolescenului miop) published in English by Istros in 2016, which deals with his time at school.  Now he is at university in Bucharest (1925-28) and he wrote Gaudeamus in a couple of week-long bursts in February and March of his graduation year.  Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent had already appeared in serial form, and is referred to in this book (his friends argue about their depictions in it).

Gaudeamus  poses as autobiographical, but to what extent it has been fictionalised is unclear (according to the introduction checkable aspects have been shown to be accurate, while other parts are clearly fiction).  It is best therefore to refer to the narrator rather than Eliade as the central character.  The narrator is extremely intelligent and ambitious, but the narrative shows how the university experience does not differ much in place or time: the neuroticism generated by the relentlessness of reading and exams, the worry that one is slipping behind, the pursuit of excellence beset by distractions, desire for members of the opposite sex; such aspects of student life are constant.

The changing seasons provide the backdrop to the narrator’s academic career.  He hardens, from being sociable, offering his attic living space for the formation of a student club with singing and drinking, to a semi-recluse who sees himself above the common man, his view of his peers literally a lofty one.  Gradually he eschews company, to the point his friends become concerned he is mentally ill.  However, he does not remain on his mountain top entirely, as even at this early stage in his career he is writing articles for the press.  However, as time progresses he narrows his focus to private study instead of the communal activity of lectures, working punishing hours until his head swims.  Gaudeamus is, among other things, a hymn to books and the reading obsession.

When he is socialising with his peers he engages in earnest conversations about the meaning of life, though these are of a higher tone than the usual intellectual fumblings of undergraduates.  The keyword is mediocrity, the greatest sin in his eyes, yet a label he is happy to assign his peers without compunction.  He may be precocious, but there is an underlying smugness in his sense of superiority.  We learn less than we might expect about Bucharest in the late 1920s as the focus is relentlessly on him and the exercise of his will.  He sees himself explicitly in heroic terms, with hints here of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, overcoming distractions while remaining above the bourgeois herd.

Unfortunately self-aggrandising can have unfortunate consequences for those in the hero’s orbit.  His views of sex relations are drawn largely from Dante and Cervantes, not particularly useful models in the twentieth century, and expressed in a misogynistic rather than chivalric attitude.  This results in the poor treatment of the two main women in his life, Nișka and Nonora, treatment he justifies in philosophical terms.  In particular he sees himself as the creator and moulder of Nișka’s personality – to which worryingly she concurs (a hallmark of emotional abuse).  He considers women’s education as a prelude to a lifetime of domestic concerns and therefore inevitable mediocrity, and those men weak enough to become so entangled prey to the same consequence: domesticity as the enemy of promise.  While tempted, he takes pride in having the strength of character to withstand their attractions.

Incapable of seeing women on equal terms with himself, unfortunately for them he sees his ability to remain immune from banal romantic attraction as a test of his personality, whatever the emotional havoc he might wreak on anyone unfortunate enough to fall in love with him.  For him romance is an intellectual exercise best conducted through lengthy correspondence (that with Nișka is reproduced verbatim, presumably written by Eliade, not the person Nișka is modelled on, at least one hopes so, in which he ignores, even revels in, her extreme emotional distress).  He is blunt in his assessments of their prospects to the point of brutality, seeing himself above such pettiness.

As if emotional abuse was not bad enough, he commits what amounts to a rape simply to enphasise the primacy of his wants, though at the same time transgressing his principle of detachment.  Meeting Nonora in the street he invites her back to his attic, promising to be ‘good’.  Once there, despite repeated protests to stop and telling him she is engaged, he assaults her.  As he describes it, ‘I was annoyed by her resistance, like that of a virginal tease … I pushed her down.  With one arm I pinned her arms, with the other I parted her knees and subdued her thighs.  The act took place before Nonora could even comprehend, and before I could hesitate.  We pleasured our bodies.’  Not really ‘we’ when she sobs afterwards and asks why he did it.

Given Eliade’s evident approval of his alter ego’s approach to life, it is not surprising to learn he was associated with Romania’s far right in the 1930s.  There are hints in Gaudeamus of widespread anti-Semitism which the narrator may not particularly like, possibly because he looks down on the individuals espousing such views rather than because he disapproves of the sentiments themselves, but does not challenge.  He is evasive about his own political views.

The book ends with the narrator having graduated and setting off on his own, without emotional encumbrances – as we always knew he would be – on life’s adventure.  Assuming author and narrator share characteristics, they have pretentiousness (a charge Eliade himself levelled against Gaudeamus later) and self-regard in common.  The introduction confirms what I had suspected: the influence on Eliade of André Gide.  It is reasonable to assume he had read at least Les Nourritures Terrestres (1897), though he was much more rigorous intellectually than Gide.  We can admire Eliade’s strength of purpose while disliking his self-absorption.

On the other hand, self-absorption paid off as Gaudeamus is an assured achievement for a 21-year old.  In fact it is so assured one wonders if it was reworked later.  There is certainly one point, highlighted by Alexandrescu, where he must have done so.  At the end he refers to the forthcoming destruction of the house, with his attic, to be replaced by a tall, grey building.  This was the case, but it did not happen until 1935.  There may have been other changes made to the manuscript after 1928.

Whatever changes may have been made, the book as it stands captures the personality of a remarkable, but flawed, individual at a pivotal moment.  Although the narrator may no longer be an adolescent, in his way he is still short-sighted.  With his obvious intellectual abilities, as he rides off on his early morning train there can be no doubt that as he, hopefully, matures emotionally, he is destined for great things.  It is ironic he sees so much personal promise in the dawn when, in 1928, the same could not be said for the continent as a whole.