3 December 2019

Sun Alley, by Cecilia Ştefănescu


Cecilia Ştefănescu’s Intrarea soarelui (2008), published in English as Sun Alley (Istros Books, 2013), is an enigmatic novel tracing the relationship of Emilia and Sorin, generally known as Emi and Sal.  The story is told from Sal’s perspective, though there are hints he may not be a reliable narrator.  Childhood friends on the cusp of puberty – not quite platonic yet not fully sexual, apart from some fumbling Sal initiates – they bond then undergo the vicissitudes of painful separation, and reacquaintance in adulthood, by which time they are married to other people and Sal and his wife have twin daughters.  Their extra-marital affair naturally brings complications when their spouses find out.

As children they live close to each other in Bucharest, Sal in the titular Sun Alley.  The time seems to be the 1980s, though there is little sense of the political situation.  These could be kids anywhere, with the same interests as those in other cities in other countries at that time: Sal is part of a gang of boys who play football and mess around.  By the time they reach adulthood, Emi and Sal are living in a post-communist society, but they are as locked into their mutual roles as they ever were.

The children try to keep their relationship secret from Sal’s friends and parents, as if that is possible, but it does mean secrecy becomes an integral part of their feelings for each other.  Sal first meets Emi when she is in the middle of cutting pictures out of magazines, careless of the owner’s feelings.  And so it proves in her attitude to males, as Sal learns as an adult that not only did she have sex with Sal’s friend Harry, albeit at Harry’s insistence, but may have done with other friends of his, and also with her husband’s brother.  Curiously when these episodes occur Sal loses consciousness, so at some level he may intuit what is happening, even if in some kind of altered state.  It is the sort of novel that refuses to spell such things out, leaving interpretations open.

Early on the reader realises this is not going to be an ordinary coming-of-age story because there is a dreamlike quality to much of the book and the narrative thread is often difficult to follow.  For example, on his way to see Emi, Sal is caught in a shower and shelters in Harry’s building.  Going into the basement he finds the corpse of a beautiful young woman, and ghoulishly cuts off her finger bearing a gemstone ring on it.  Naturally he wants to share the secret with Emi and gives her the ring, which as an adult she wears.  Who the corpse is, and why she is laid out in the basement, are unresolved matters.  If not for the ring she might never have existed outside Sal’s imagination.

Later Sal persuades Emi to run away as his family is moving to another district and they will be separated.  After various misadventures they find refuge in the garden shed of an old man who lives alone, and he gives them food, until Sal’s parents and the police arrive to take them home.  Sal’s ability to persuade Emi, verging on controlling behaviour, appears to continue into adulthood, with Emi the emotionally frailer of the two.  Sal’s family do move, which seems to put an end to the friendship, until they meet again by chance twenty years later.

The novel shifts timeframes in a complex elliptical patterning from childhood to adulthood and back again.  In fact it is possible the child and adult versions overlap, the youngsters eavesdropping on their adult selves, or adults with similar preoccupations to those they will have at the same age.  Or does Sal have precognitive visions?  There is a hint the body in the basement is Emi in the future, yet it seems she dies in an hotel room, and the ring Sal steals from the body is real enough.  In hospital, the young Sal meets another patient who calls herself ‘Mary Jane’, but may be a vision of a future Emi after a suicide attempt.  Sal recounts the tragic love of Tristan and Isolde to Emi, and says of Tristan he ‘has a special capacity: that of seeing things that others don’t see.’  He might be talking about himself.  Yet paradoxically he fails to see what is in front of his eyes, most notably at the end when he thinks Emi is sleeping on the hotel bed, though it is clear she is dead.

Ştefănescu has a good sense of the physicality of love, especially young love, and the thin line between consent and coercion.  When the action moves to the adult Sal and Emi it feels pedestrian by contrast.  She explores a variety of themes in an assured manner: the pleasures and insecurities of adolescent love; how early hopes can be unfulfilled; the pain of betrayal by those we thought we could rely on but who prove untrustworthy; the attempt to balance our commitments and our desires, and the selfish nature of the latter.

Contemplating the destructive nature of Sal and Emi’s bond, the reader wonders if this is love or rather co-dependency, willing to sacrifice the happiness of others for their own but with Emi not strong enough to rise to the challenge.  At the end they are left with each other, Sal experiencing visions of people who are not present.  The pair are in the hotel room, and after stripping Emi when she is clearly dead Sal finds her breasts ‘flaccid, lifeless flesh.  He shivered and swung round to ask his friends for help, but they had left.  Most likely, they had had enough of the charade, were sick of all the pretence and lies.’  And who could blame them?

10 November 2019

Ionaș visează că plouă


Ionaș Dreams of Rain is a 2017 28-minute short directed by Dragoș Hanciu made as part of the Aristoteles workshop held in Maramureș, the aim of which is to produce a film from start to finish in five weeks.  It won the best documentary award at the workshop.

Elderly Ionaș stays in a caravan to be able to walk his cornfield at night.  He has to protect it against the wild boars that come out from the forest and raid his crop despite the electric fence and the cannon, the booms of which punctuate the silence.

It is a lonely existence, broken only by a visit from his brother-in-law.  There is a lot of sitting with his thoughts for company, and time hangs heavy, his patrols punctuated by dozing and staring at his watch.

He reminisces a little about his earliest days.  The Russians arrived during the war, chasing out the Hungarians, when he was only three days old, and he spent two nights under a bridge.  But we never learn about his background or history.

Much of his talk is about dreams.  He says sleep is only a step away from death because we are not aware of anything; dreaming indicates we are not dead, and he notes that after dreaming of someone who is dead, it will rain at some point.

He mentions he had been dreaming of his father, and it begins to rain.  Unfortunately the rain tends to bring the boars with it, though on this night they do not appear.  Life is short, Ionaș says, and fades like a dream.  Dawn comes, and the final shot is of him lying in bed, so still he could be dead.

22 October 2019

Romanian Cinema/Cinema românesc (2014)


This short documentary directed by Vlad Nedelcu, billed as ‘Cinema made in Romania’ (‘Văzut în toată lumea, dar nu acasă: Seen all over the world, but not at home’) contemplates the state of Romanian film.  ‘What does Romanian cinema mean to you?’ is the first question asked, and the answers given by the interviewees – directors, actors, a producer and a critic – suggest difficulty pinning it down.

Before the Second World War Romanian film production had been open, but under communist rule with only rare exceptions it became nationally isolated, heavily regulated and censored. Romanian directors’ work was uneven, and although some tried to express a personal vision despite the orthodoxy, it was with limited success.

All funding came from the state, with no private money, and box office ratings were not an issue as it was not a commercial climate.  National output was small, 20-30 films each year, still a significant number given the technical constraints on production.  Cinemagoing was a popular activity because there were few leisure alternatives, not because Romanian films were particularly powerful.

There was a crisis in the late 1980s when production declined so the national debt could be paid.  Television broadcasting was also reduced and cinemagoing filled the gap, albeit the quality was variable. For financial and ideological reasons foreign language films were not shown.  The situation was not unique to Romania in communist countries, but it was more severe than in others.

In the years after 1989 some aspects changed, such as the freedom to explore new themes, though the directors remained the same.  Foreign films appeared in the early 1990s with an improved distribution network, but evolution in Romanian film was slow; an initial expectation of creative flowering did not materialise and there was corruption in the awarding of funds.

So Romanian cinema entered the doldrums during the 1990s as the industry tried to decide what to do with its new-found freedom; an assumption that a hitherto forbidden sexual emphasis would play well with the public was mistaken, and films were of poor quality.  It required a new generation of filmmakers to bring a fresh approach.

Romanian cinema improved in the early 2000s, when it heralded a New Wave, though actors, with a strong theatre heritage, found it a steep learning curve.  However, there is now more competition for leisure time than there used to be.  Romanian films are strong in depicting realistic situations with energy, and making the most of small budgets, but this does not make for widespread popularity at home.

There does not seem to be a strong identity for Romanian film, nor a significant art house film buff culture in Romania.  Referring to films made after 2000, ‘not so loved at home, but critically acclaimed abroad’ is the verdict.  The consensus is that Romanian films appeal to those who make them and to the critics more than they do to the Romanian public.

As in many countries, the average Romanian cinemagoer prefers Hollywood blockbusters over those relating to unvarnished experience as expressed in ‘Romanian Minimalist Cinema’.  There is little desire to see the problems of everyday life reflected back.  Interviewees suggested that more home-grown commercial films are needed to expand the range available and help to address the imbalance.

It was pointed out that the situation might improve if directors were more responsive to domestic audiences, rather than making films to suit themselves, but it was also noted that while these films may not do well in Romania itself, they tend to sell in other countries.  As a result, at least Romanian cinema is now on the map internationally.

The documentary is available from Cinepub, itself evidence of a thriving Romanian film culture:

9 October 2019

Life Begins on Friday, by Ioana Pârvulescu


Set in Bucharest, Ioana Pârvulescu’s 2009 novel Viaţa începe vineri, elegantly translated by Alistair Ian Blyth and published by Istros Books, has a broad cast of characters who intersect during the final weeks of 1897, beginning on ‘Friday 19 December: An Eventful Day’, to make up a portrait of the city as it accelerates towards the new century.  Indeed, Pârvulescu, in providing a list of the major and minor figures who populate her novel, teasingly includes as ‘unconventional characters’ Bucharest and time, and they do play as significant a role as any of the others she has created.

On that fateful Friday Petre, a coachman, finds two men lying near each other in the winter snow in the Băneasa area on the north side of the city.  One is a young aristocrat who has been shot.  The other is oddly-dressed Dan Creţu, an enigmatic figure who may be from the future.  Dan is suspected of being responsible for the other man’s injuries, but denies it.  The wounded man dies in hospital shortly after saying a few words which do not seem to make sense, but not naming his assailant.

Resolution of the various mysteries the novel generates takes second place to the kaleidoscopic treatment of character and place.  Nicu, a messenger boy aged eight, is connected to the newspaper Universal and links a variety of other people.  He is friends with Jacques Margulis, a sickly boy on crutches whose sister Iulia is reading Vanity Fair in English and using it as a touchstone for her unfulfilling romantic life (feeling she resembles Amelia Sedley more than she does Becky Sharp).  She emerges as the novel’s main narrator as we peer over her shoulder at her journal.

Dan is vague about his background, but it is obvious he knows about journalism, and he is taken on by Universul.  He is liked by all with whom he comes into contact, despite his unfamiliarity with many of the customs, and he seems a most unlikely assassin.  For his part, he feels adrift in this new environment, simultaneously strange and familiar, which lends him an exotic air.  He becomes the reader’s eyes in assessing the differences and similarities between 1897 and the present, and gauging their value.

At a New Year’s party towards the end of the novel, those gathered make predictions, many destined to come to pass, not least the takeover by ‘the reds’.  It is a beautifully poignant section, one full of hope for the future and the promise technology brings, though hope ultimately undermined by undesirable political realities.  There is a sense of sadness for a vibrant society destined to undergo deep travails in the century ahead.

For most of the narrative it is left unclear whether Dan has truly traveled back in time, but the novel concludes in the present, with Dan dropping into the magazine office he works at and being surprised to see, in an old copy of Universul somebody has found, a name very similar to his under an item headed ‘Why do you fast?’ – the very first task he was given when he arrived in such peculiar circumstances in 1897.  How he was transported to the past is left unexplained, but the ennui he experienced in the present has given way to a more fulfilling existence.

Pârvulescu is an academic historian and has written a novel full of the atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Bucharest (fully justifying the oft-cited parallel with Paris) which brings the city alive.  It is unusual Romanian fiction in dealing with the nineteenth century, and Mircea Cărtărescu’s afterword notes that Life Begins on Friday is a singular novel even by the standards of current Romanian literature as a ‘book of delicate nostalgia’.  It was a time when Romania was finding itself as a nation and Life Begins on Friday hints at a path untravelled.  The sense of optimism, when ‘people thrummed like telegraph wires,’ causes us to think about how the future could have been very different, and rather better than the one which transpired.

30 September 2019

The Girl They Left Behind, by Roxanne Veletzos


The style of Roxanne Veletzos’s 2018 novel feels artless, but nevertheless it draws the reader into the heartbreaking story it tells.  The story opens on a January night in 1941, in a Romania allied with Germany and increasingly hostile to Jews.  A small Jewish girl, Natalia, has been found on her own freezing in front of a block of flats.  She is put in an orphanage and is eventually adopted by a well-to-do couple, Despina and her charismatic husband Anton, who are unable to have children.

Anton started with nothing and by his hard work has built a successful chain of stationery shops.  The couple provide a warm loving environment and Natalia thrives.  Unfortunately their happiness does not last long.  The family has to survive a series of misfortunes: the uncertainties of war, Natalia’s desperate bout of fever in which Despina is ironically assisted by a German officer as she seeks medical help, the country’s defeat and occupation by the Red Army, and then the hardships of the communist period, where hostility for being bourgeois replaces persecution for being Jewish.

Through the changing political situation we follow Natalia as she grows and becomes a young woman, facing a dark future in an authoritarian country where she and her family are despised for being affluent.  The Russian occupiers are nothing more than looters and rapists, and the Romanian bureaucrats expropriate the family’s possessions and finally their flat, moving them to a grim communal apartment while denying Anton the opportunity to work.  Having lost his business and their home, he becomes a shell of the vibrant man he had been, while Natalia is deprived of her beloved piano.  She has trouble finding work, and after a stint in the fields outside Bucharest gets a slightly more congenial occupation packing fruit.

By chance she comes across papers relating to her birth parents and adoption in a drawer, but when she tries to find out about her origins she discovers the orphanage has closed and been turned into a military headquarters.  Eventually she learns that her birth parents, Zora and Iosef, had had to flee to Switzerland to escape the Holocaust, and they eventually settled in New York.  Had they tried to take her with them, they would probably all have perished; giving her up was a selfless act of love.  They initially thought they would be able to return for her, but once the Iron Curtain fell this was no longer possible, though they never gave up hope and made efforts to secure her freedom, engaging an American lawyer and saving what little money they could to pay the necessary bribes to facilitate her emigration.

Salvation for Natalia comes from an unlikely source.  When she was small her father had befriended a young man, Victor, who had been on the verge of starvation, becoming almost a surrogate father to him.  Now Victor is a senior figure in the Securitate.  When she is in her early 20s he and Natalia meet by chance after not having seen each other for a decade, and they become lovers.  But there can be no future for them as he is in a marriage of convenience with the daughter of a senior Russian official.

However, he is able to expedite Natalia leaving the country using money sent by Zora and Iosef, and in 1960 she joins her birth parents in the United States, but at the cost of being wrenched from Anton and Despina.  The ending is truly moving, as Natalia is reunited with her birth parents but separated from her adoptive ones and from Victor, who all in their own ways have helped her.  She realises she is much loved, and the book ends with her happy, thinking of Anton, Despina and Victor, and dreaming of a time when they might all be reunited (while the reader wonders whether leaving Anton and Despina was a selfish act reversing their selflessness).

The story is apparently inspired by Veletzos’ own mother, Alexandra, though one wonders how much, as Veletzos was born in Bucharest, not the United States, and moved to California in her early teens.  No matter, the story of Zora, Iosef, Anton and Despina sounds authentically harrowing even when one quibbles with details (would Iosef and Zora really have left a small ill-clad child on an icy street where she might have frozen to death before being rescued?).  One black mark against Simon and Schuster: the cataloguing keywords refer to Hungary and Budapest; presumably someone in the marketing department mistook Bucharest for Budapest, which is very sloppy and guaranteed to annoy a Romanian.

2 September 2019

Crossing Continents: Romania’s Killer Roads

  
Tessa Dunlop reports for BBC Radio 4’s Crossing Continents programme, first broadcast on 22 August 2019, about road conditions in Romania.  Having visited and worked there since the early 1990s (and with Romanian relatives) she has become increasingly aware of how dangerous the roads are.  She focuses on the state of the road network in north-eastern Romania, though she says the situation is replicated across the country.

Roads have not improved since the 1989 revolution, while the amount of traffic has increased.  There is not a safe driving culture: people ignore the speed limits and the rules of the road; alcohol and drugs are contributory factors to the high accident rate, while slow-moving horse and carts add to the problem.  Railway crossings without barriers are accident hot-spots claiming an alarming number of lives each year.

Stefan Mandachi, a successful and charismatic businessman, is leading the ‘Romania vrea autostrazi’ (Romania wants highways) campaign to build motorways in the region.  Spurred into action by his inability to reach his dying mother in hospital because of the lack of decent roads, his efforts include a video, billboards and the hashtag #sieu (count me in).  He constructed a symbolic metre of motorway which has become a tourist attraction.

Mandachi says 60,000 people have died on Romanian roads since 1989.  Two thousand die each year, the highest rate per capita in the EU, twice the EU average and 3-4 times the figure for the UK.  Mandachi says that new roads, including motorways, are required, following which bad behaviour should be punished, in order to reduce the number of fatalities and serious injuries.  In March 2019 he called on the country to stop work for fifteen minutes in a bid to persuade the authorities to build motorways

Judging by Dunlop’s interviews with politicians, they seem to be in denial about the problem and refuse to take responsibility, passing the buck for the lack of action.  There is also the issue of the loss of expertise due to migration, including engineers.  Before EU accession there wasn’t the money.  Now there is, but a shortage of skills necessary to develop the country’s infrastructure. 

Commentators agree there is money to address the situation, but feel that governments have not considered it a priority.  Fortunately, the Romanian diaspora is becoming increasingly vocal about corruption and mismanagement at home so perhaps, Dunlop concludes, there is hope for the future.

The programme is available (at the time of writing) on the BBC website:

28 August 2019

The Fox Was Ever the Hunter, by Herta Müller


In Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (1992, translated as The Fox Was Ever the Hunter), Herta Müller seems to be writing from personal experience (though not specifically dealing with the Romanian German-speaking community) but transformed by an elliptical style that gives a sense of times out of joint.  We have to work hard to make sense of what is going on, as the characters too try to make sense of life in an authoritarian society.  They know the regime and its proxies are keeping a watchful eye for signs of dissent, but generally only a light touch is needed to repress the population because they do the job themselves.

The novel is set in the period leading up to the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu in a town somewhere near the Danube.  Many characters come and go but it centres on a group of friends: Adina is a school teacher, who had been in a relationship with Paul.  Paul is a doctor and plays in a band.  Clara works in a wire factory and has an affair with Pavel, who brings her groceries.

Unfortunately Pavel works for the Securitate.  While one might think this would provide some protection, in Romania it actually affords more opportunities for surveillance because loyalty is in short supply.  The group is just anti-establishment enough to warrant the attention of the security service.  A concert in which Paul and Abi (Albert) are playing is brutally broken up and Abi, one of the members, arrested and interrogated by Pavel, dying in custody.

For Adina, the surveillance takes a bizarre form.  When she returns to her flat one day she finds that her fox-fur rug has had its tail neatly sliced and replaced.  Over time the limbs are sliced, like some countdown to a confrontation, then finally the head.  Someone seems to be sending her a message and intimidating her, the menace overlaying a sense of absurdism.

She pushes the fox parts back together while trying to carry on with her life, pretending the fractures are not there but knowing that while the menace may not be overt, it has the ability to get inside her head.  Repression is most successful when it is oblique and internalised.  Increasingly unsettled, eventually the strain is unbearable.  She becomes distressed while vainly trying to buy a bottle of brandy before 10 am.  In a sense her hysteria stands in for the nation’s.

The novel’s strength is the portrait of everyday existence, one characterised by a pervasive air of threat and mutual suspicion.  There is an emphasis on dirt, depicting a material poverty matching a poverty of spirit.  Daily life is continuous joyless drudgery, and conformity is wearing.  For a supposedly communist society there is little sense of community; when the tinsmith hangs himself items in his workshop, including the rope, are pilfered by his neighbours.  Petty theft from the factory is a matter of pitting wits with the gatekeepers (the gatekeepers invariably win because tellingly they recognise the signs)

The country is the site of both economic and sexual exploitation.  The director at the wire factory preys on the female employees, fathering who knows how many children.  All those in authority are out for what they can get, right to the top.  When not exploitative, sex is used as a safety valve to take the edge off the misery.  A cat becomes pregnant annually always eats her litter, mourns, yet repeatedly does it – a metaphor for the regime.  Occasionally people try to escape by swimming the Danube, but the chances of success are small.

Pavel is the one slicing Adina’s fox.  When Adina realises who Pavel is and that Clara’s friendship with him has put the circle of friends at risk she confronts Clara, which breaks their friendship.  Eventually Adina and Paul escape to the country to hide out, where they stay until they hear of the Ceaușescus’ flight from Bucharest on 22 December 1989.  They open the curtains and the light floods in.  The fox fur may have been dismembered, but as Adina says, ‘the fox is still the hunter.’  Pavel uses Abi’s passport to escape the country, cunning to the last.

25 July 2019

The Passport, by Herta Müller

  
Herta Müller, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009, is Romanian but has lived in Germany since 1987 and writes in German (her first language).  The title of her novel translated as The Passport is a Romanian saying, Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt (Man is a Great Pheasant in the World) and we know what happens to pheasants.  It was published in 1986, while Müller was still living in Romania, and writing it in those circumstances dictated its allusiveness.

Windisch, a miller, is an ethnic German living in Romania some time after the Second World War.  Life in the Banat, where Müller herself is from, is hard, with a sense that in Romania the Germans’ lives are not unique in their drabness.  He and his family face poverty and corruption, with little hope of improvement in their circumstances.  It is an unsophisticated rural community ruled by custom and superstition, where you can tell if a girl is no longer a virgin by her toes pointing outwards.  Windisch consequently wishes to emigrate to the land of his ancestors in the West for a better life.

As if rural poverty and political repression are not enough to contend with, this is a generation that had lived through the Second World War.  Afterwards, many of the Germans, who had been settled in Romania for generations, had been deported to Russia for forced labour.  Windisch’s wife Katharina had been sent to work in a mine and had had to first swap clothes, and then sex, for food in order to sate the spiny ‘hedgehog’ in her stomach and survive, a fact with which her unsympathetic husband reproaches her.

It requires great persistence to obtain the necessary paperwork to be able to move to West Germany.  To oil the wheels, Windisch bribes those in authority with bags of flour, but having an attractive daughter means flour is not enough.  He is obliged to use his daughter Amélie as a bargaining chip, hinting at a country that despite its avowed communism still runs on cynical self-interest, with no one in authority immune.

One might expect poor behaviour from low-level bureaucrats, but far from providing spiritual consolation, the local priest lasciviously seduces any woman he can, and Amélie has to provide him with certain services in exchange for the baptismal certificates that are part of the emigration application.  Afterwards, Windisch notices her toes now point outwards.

Eventually Windisch achieves his aim, and even fulfils his fantasy of his family returning for a visit, driving a Mercedes which, as it enters the village, passes scrawny horses pulling a cart: modernity and the past juxtaposed.  The ill-fitting suit he was wearing when he left has been replaced by one the right size, cut from the same cloth as his wife’s.  ‘It’s as if we never lived here,’ Katharina says as she looks round.  The sacrifices and accommodations have, one presumes, been worth it.

The story is told in an elliptical style, with no obvious narrative direction.  It consists of short sentences in a series of brief chapters depicting the lives of the villagers, the dour fractured prose reflecting a time out of joint.  While not explicity critical of the Ceaușescu regime, the cumulative impression is negative at a time the Romanian government was attempting to display the country as a success, and the mere fact of wanting to emigrate from the workers’ paradise would have been controversial.  The novel works on a metaphorical level as well, because if one cannot protect one’s child, and Ceaușescu is supposedly the father of the nation, what does that say about him?

4 July 2019

The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter, by Matei Călinescu


It is remarkable to think that Matei Călinescu’s The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter (Viata si opiniile lui Zacharias Lichter, translated by Adriana Călinescu and Breon Mitchell) was published in 1969, during the Ceaușescu regime.  Appearing in a brief period of thaw in Romania, it was nodded through by the authorities on the grounds there was nothing overtly hostile to the government.  However, it is a long way from espousing socialist principles; in fact the titular Zacharias Lichter does not conform to the norms of society of any kind.  Insofar as there is a message it is a plea for individualism during a period when life was regimented, and Lichter is the supreme petit-bourgeois asocial element.  That publication did Călinescu’s career no good in the long run is indicated by his move to the United States in 1973.

The title hints that the book will follow the picaresque style of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.  It is presented in short sections, a mix of brief essays, reflections and poems, depicting a fictional biography and the milieu in which Lichter moves.  Norman Manea in his introduction notes Călinescu set it in the 1930s (to avoid the imputation it was a critique of the current situation), but while the style has a ‘60s counter-culture ambience hinting at influences from Nietzsche, Herman Hesse and existential meaninglessness – all modish at the time – there is a lack of specificity which gives the setting a weightless feel.

From a Jewish petit-bourgeois family, Lichter had been a brilliant student, but he rejected a conventional path of family and career along with the normal comforts most people demand.  He had had a divine experience in which he considered he had been struck by God’s flame when he collapsed in a public park and experienced visions (so perhaps is epileptic).  He is highly intelligent but has chosen to tread his own path as a beggar in Bucharest, though he gives away anything he earns to other beggars he considers more in need.  He rejects the idea of work as it constrains the spirit, considering modern existence to be inauthentic and full of trivialities.  He lives in a disused garage, his only possession a bible.

Uninterested in opposing social conventions, he merely ignores them.  When arrested by accident for a crime he did not commit he disdains to protest his innocence, and is only released when the actual criminal is caught.  Having acquired a mystic bent, he ignores the minutiae of everyday living and politics but has plenty to say about the things he is interested in to a demi-monde band of acquaintances, to whom he is ever-ready to present his general philosophy.  His best friend is Leopold Nacht, though Poldy is not much of a conversationalist as he is generally drunk, despite which Lichter considers him a significant philosopher.  As in much of life, appearances can be deceptive and bear an arbitrary relationship to underlying reality.

Street philosopher Lister’s stock-in-trade is the absurd.  He incorporates the figure of the clown, displaying both laughter and tears at life’s ridiculousness, but able to see more clearly than those who cannot move beyond surface impressions, which they assume to be coherent.  Adrian Leonescu, a professor of English phonetics (not literature, phonetics) is a foolish character who is obsessed with the pronunciation of words, but not their meaning or the ideas they represent.  He symbolises a fetishisation of phenomena rather than the search for an understanding of noumena.  Lichter sees people as belonging to the realm of ‘the stupid’ because of their attachment to possessions and narrowly superficial view of the world.

Lichter prefers speech (Thus spake Zacharias, as it were) to writing because it is impermanent, his sole literary activity being the creation of terrible verses he immediately discards, only for them to be frequently retrieved by his ‘biographer’.  Unlike most philosophers, he considers his life, not a literary output, to be his work, in which he celebrates contradiction and unpredictability: his most notable achievements are his suffering and poverty.  He attacks writing because it corrupts memory and ossifies experience, and prevents the creative process of forgetting.

Ironically Lichter’s biographer, by writing about him, has subverted the essence of Lichter’s view of life.  In an epilogue Lichter attacks the project despite not having read it, claiming the biographer is actually writing about himself.  Given what Lichter has said about writing, he sees the effort as a betrayal, so that God’s flame, which initially inspired him, will freeze instead of burn.  The biographer is filled with shame and considers burning the manuscript, but Lichter remarks that the sin was in writing it.  Yet without the book, Lichter and all he represents will vanish in time.  His is a philosophy that eats itself, in danger of disappearing down an epistemological rabbit hole.  However, for the first readers, stifled by political orthodoxy, one can imagine that the individualism it represented was refreshing.

Călinescu’s own attitude to Lichter is hard to fathom, but presumably it is one of admiration for standing outside the mainstream while, as an author, disagreeing with the notion that producing a book is sinful or that all writing is a form of autobiography.  Of course Lichter’s sense of freedom is only possible in a society kept going by the efforts of others.  This is not a programme for universal living, fortunately.  Lichter’s unprepossessing appearance, which is oft-remarked, hints at a degree of anti-Semitism (he possesses a ‘peerless Semitic nose’), but in the end he is merely a mouthpiece for a rather turgid philosophy Călinescu surely did not endorse but probably hoped would irritate the authorities, an endeavour which was ultimately successful.

10 June 2019

I'm an Old Commie!, by Dan Lungu


Dan Lungu’s 2011 novel Sînt o babă comunistă!, ably translated from Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth, recounts the reminiscences of Emilia Apostoae told in three interweaved timeframes: her hard early life in the country, her working life during the Ceaușescu era, and her life after the revolution.  Now a pensioner living in a small town in northern Romania, she feels disconnected from the post-Communist world, where the certainties she knew as a young woman have vanished.  Much poorer financially than she was before the revolution, she is confused by the pace of change and misses the old days.

Emilia had grown up in rural poverty but her glamorous urban Aunt Lucreția, with nice clothes and painted nails, was her role model.  As soon as she could, not wanting a life that included treading dung in bare feet to make briquettes for the fire, Emilia had escaped to the town, and consequently valued a system that allowed her to make her way independently and not, as her parents had wanted, remain in the village.  She had established herself with the initial help of Aunt Lucreția (who did well out of the arrangement in terms of cleaning and childcare) then moved on to a hostel, and finally was able to have a flat.  She married and was educating herself at evening class until she fell pregnant and gave it up for employment in a metalworking factory.

Her parents had treated her with sad reproach for abandoning them (as her sister had, also moving to town), but Emilia’s engineer daughter Alice travels even further in search of greater opportunities.  She has emigrated to Canada and married a local.  A minor theme of the book is the emptying of the countryside for a better life in towns, or even in other countries.  Now, a decade after the revolution which toppled the Ceaușescu regime, elections are about to take place in Romania, and Alice telephones to try to persuade her mother to vote for a non-Communist candidate.  To Alice’s annoyance, Emilia argues life was better back then, and given the choice she would go back to the way things were.  The conversation prompts Emilia to look over her life.

She had been a Party member, more by accident than design as her factory needed to increase its number of women comrades, though she concedes that membership brought privileges.  She was certainly not ideologically driven and kept her Orthodox faith (which nearly got her into trouble).  The work was not too arduous and the workers in her unit, producing for export and therefore for prized hard currency, were looked after by an astute foreman and lived well, at least compared to the average Romanian citizen.  There may have been difficulties for others, but she did OK.  Now in reduced circumstances, it’s a case of ‘what has capitalism ever done for me?’

Emilia ignores the fact she led a relatively privileged existence, able to acquire luxuries in roundabout ways, while most citizens faced shortages of basics, long queues when goods were available, and substandard housing.  Under communism there was bribery and nepotism, but that was fine for those who benefited from the system, taking advantage of a thriving black market.  Even teachers expected ‘presents’ and treated their pupils according to the sweeteners they received from parents.  Despite the situation for most people, Emilia had been happy, ignoring the drawbacks. 

The quality of her life changed after 1989.  Before, prices had been low, but with market forces operating, inflation has eaten into her resources, putting the goods on offer out of her reach.  What is the point of all this choice if one cannot afford any of it?  Her factory, which meant so much to her, has been closed and stripped, and she cannot bear to look at it when she passes by.  For all its faults, communism gave Emilia’s life meaning, its social structures providing security.  No wonder not everybody welcomed its fall.

When her husband suggests moving back to the country to make ends meet she refuses because a return to what she had escaped from would be a defeat, so he commutes to work on his sister’s holding, though not very efficiently.  In a way this pleases Emilia because the last thing she wanted to do was marry a farmer, though she hates it when he returns smelling of dung, as it reminds her of her childhood.

But while she was happy under communism she learns of its darker side when talking to an elderly neighbour whose father, a factory-owning tailor, was branded an enemy of the people in the late 1940s and his factory expropriated.  It had meant hard times for the family for many years, and unfulfilled promise for Emilia’s neighbour, who had had aspirations to be a painter.  Emilia is told her old communist bosses have all grown rich in the new Romania, suggesting they were only ever out for their own interests, making the best of whatever political climate prevailed.

Mulling it over, she comes to a more balanced view of the past, but still finds herself out of sympathy with the present.  Despite the political repression then, now she sees that people die of hunger or sleep on the streets, which would never have happened when ‘Uncle Nick’ was in charge.  Previously she had a better life than many, but now she is ‘other people’, and hankers for a time when ‘other people’ were ‘other people’.

To try to recreate some of the feelings she used to have, she comes up with a plan to resurrect her old workshop with her sister (who worked alongside her at the factory) and other colleagues, but she finds they have moved on and do not share her rosy view of the past.  She even discovers that their co-worker Mr Mitu, always ready with jokes about Ceaușescu, was in fact a police informer.  Feeling down at the end of the novel, as she ponders on the forthcoming election she decides she will probably not vote.  She has been pushed to the margins, so why should she bother?  What is the point of freedom when it is only an abstraction, and material life is worse?

While the general feeling is melancholic, the novel is at times funny, particularly the old jokes told against ‘The Genius of the Carpathians’ by Mitu poking fun at the regime (we learn that Ceaşcă – cup – was a nickname given to Ceaușescu), but Emilia represents a definite sense of nostalgia, a Romanian version of ostalgie, for ways that may have been bad, but in some ways have been replaced by ways not much better and often worse.  There must be many Emilias in Romania, and elsewhere in the old communist countries, having to find a new way under a system they had been taught to despise.  The revolution did not benefit everybody.  Some lost what they knew, with nothing as good substituted.

The weirdness of the Ceaușescu period is captured in a projected visit to town, causing stressful days of cleaning, polishing and repairing, down to hiding black cows because they do not project an ‘optimistic’ tone, lacquering the hooves of the others to make them look like the cows in pictures books, and replacing small crops by the roadside with bigger ones from a research plot to impress the dignitaries.  This is a fantasy provided to show the General Secretary everything is fine, but cocooning the elite in an illusion that life is good for ordinary people and therefore their policies are correct.  In the event the factory is on standby for the presidential party to arrive for an inspection, but they leave town without visiting it.

There is nothing preachy in this novel; instead it is a subtle examination of Romania during and after the Ceaușescu regime.  It comes down to a matter of utility: which produced the greatest happiness of the greatest number, the communist badly-planned system pre-1989 or the free market post-1989?  On this showing it is not as easy to determine as one might think.  What I can say is that Emilia is not alone and her views are not only shared by pensioners, as recently I heard positive things said by a young Romanian about Ceaușescu, and modern Romanian governance compared unfavourably to his regime.

 

Update 5 February 2022:

On 28 January 2022, a number of translations of the same short section of Sînt o babă comunistă, pages 85-90 of the edition published by Editura Polirom, appeared in issue 220 of Translation Café (‘eZine of Modern Texts in Translation’).  Translation Café is a publication of the Literary Translation Master's Programme of the English Department at the University of Bucharest.

The project was coordinated by Prof. Nadina Vișan, according to whom the novel was used as an opportunity to explore issues the students are too young to have experienced themselves and only know through stories told by parents and grandparents.  The result of the discussion was the decision by the nineteen students on the programme to translate separately a few pages (the beginning of chapter ten, pp.63-67 in Alistair Ian Blyth’s 2017 translation).

There are a couple of points about the Translation Café exercise worth noting.  First, a very minor one, it gives the original date of publication as 2010, but the publishing information in Blythe’s Dalkey Archive Press translation states 2011 as the year of Lungu’s copyright, and that does seem to be the year it was first published.

Secondly, Translation Café has changed the book’s Romanian title.  It appeared as Sînt o babă comunistă, but here it is called Sunt o babă comunistă – the title of the 2013 film adaptation as well.  This would appear to be a subtle, but significant, alteration.  From what I gather, sînt became sunt in the early 1990s, so using the former version would highlight Emilia’s nostalgia and sense she was out of steps with current times.  It seems an odd editorial choice to change the title when Lungu would have used it for a specific artistic purpose.

As a means of comparing and discussing how a set of words can bear multiple interpretations, a comparative approach makes a useful educational tool for the translators.  It is also a reminder to the reader that a particular translation can never be regarded as definitive: to the non-native speaker it reads like the only version possible, but it contains unseen compromises.  Placed in different hands, the result of other choices can make the end product feel markedly different.

This process of selection can be seen in the titles the translators have chosen.  While Prof Vișan, who includes her own effort, has translated it as Old, Communist and Proud of It, the students’ efforts are mostly permutations of I’m a Communist/Commie Hag/Bag, often with old thrown in.  Perhaps they had I’m an Old Communist Hag, the English-language title of the film adaptation in mind (showing how hard it can be to break free of one’s predecessors), though hag and bag carry negative associations that do not seem appropriate to Emilia.  Blyth’s title is probably still the crispest, even if not literal, though MA student Cristina Șuică’s I’m a Commie Old Trout is the more amusing.

 

 

25 April 2019

Stejarii Verzi – Green Oaks


Stejarii Verzi (Green Oaks) is a 2003 short directed by Swiss/Romanian Ruxandra Zenide.  It is set in an orphanage in rural Romania called Green Oaks which is under-resourced but has a relaxed atmosphere.  George, aged about 10 or 11, is not a model pupil but he is fiercely loyal to his 5-year old sister Gabi.  However, one day an affluent Swiss couple arrive to adopt her.  To their surprise they learn that she is not eligible for adoption due to the government policy of not splitting siblings, but she and George have different fathers hence different surnames, and this has led to the bureaucratic mistake in Bucharest.

The couple are offered another child but complain it would mean a two-year wait while the application was processed, and as they have driven halfway across Europe they are keen to take Gabi, for whom they have the correct paperwork, even if it means splitting up the children.  To circumvent the ‘no sibling’ rule they are prepared to bribe the director, and he is willing to oblige.  Getting wind of the scheme from a staff member who does not want to be party to the agreement, even if complying means enough money for her to leave, George takes Gabi at night into the woods.  Not trusting the director to do the right thing, his plan is to go to Bucharest to tell the government they have made a mistake. 

However, in the cold weather and a long way from the railway station, he realises his plan is unfeasible.  After they have spent the night in a rough shelter where Gabi has become fractious, he secretly returns to the orphanage.  He is persuaded by the sympathetic staff member to take the Swiss woman, who has been having qualms about splitting the pair up, into the woods where he retrieves Gabi.  The woman smilingly watches his tenderness towards her.  However, the final scene shows George watching the car drive away, bearing Gabi off to a better life in Switzerland.

It is a desperately sad conclusion, but a predictable one.  The Swiss couple would not want George as he is too old and less easily moulded, and although they are aware Gabi will remember her brother, they are prepared to put their own interests first.  She becomes a commodity they and the director are willing to trade.  As for George, you wonder what life has in store for him, with his far fewer prospects.  Having the maturity to realise his sister would have more opportunities in Switzerland, he is being unselfish, yet it would be surprising if there was not some envy mixed with the dejection at their separation.  The viewer is left hoping that one day the two will be reunited.

The documentary is available from Cinepub on YouTube, with English-language subtitles.  Cinepub’s page on the film, with a link, is here:

29 March 2019

Cartea Soldatului – The Soldier’s Book


The Soldier’s Book (Cartea Soldatului) is a short 2018 documentary directed by Marius Donici and Doina Rusti.  It uses the find of a novel, the margins of which had been used as a notebook by a soldier during the First World War, to tell the story of the annotator, insofar as it can be pieced together from the clues provided by the notes.

The volume was found under a shed where it sat alongside other documents.  It is the Romanian translation of a romantic novel, Jean d'Agrève (1898), by the French writer Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé.  The notes had possibly been written by a Ştefan Anghelescu, but using the nom-de-plume Fănică.

The film is presented in a bitty manner, using a mix of talking heads, photographs and actors, interweaving Fănică’s story with Romania’s changing fortunes during the Great War.  It was a time of peril, but one that ultimately forged the nation. The evidence provided by Fănică’s jottings is supplemented by archival research to build a picture of a seminal moment in Romanian history.

There was a low literacy rate in Romania at the time so Fănică’s ability to read and write was fairly unusual in a working man.  An army reservist, he was a mechanic on the railway in peacetime so possessing skills highly sought after in the army, meaning he did not serve on the front line.  He was also a painter and a traveller, and there are hints he was gregarious.

The last is suggested by the many names, of men and women but mostly women, which feature in his notes, some of whom can be identified from historical records.  One in particular, Ana, probably Ana Simionescu, is prominent, and Fănică addresses her directly; but there are names of about 40 other women.  The precise nature of his relationship with them is unclear.

Romania was hard-pressed by the Central Powers, on both north and south borders, and after initial successes suffered reverses, not aided by the Russian retreat, which knocked it out of the war until (literally) the day before the Armistice.  Fănică was possibly taken prisoner at the Battle of Mărășești in September 1917 and held at Severin.

His final entry was made in early June 1918 and what happened to him afterwards is unclear.  However, one of the interviewees recounts discovering a landscape painting recently in a second-hand bookshop, dated 1920 and signed S. Anghelescu.  Perhaps it was the same Fănică, having survived the hostilities and returned to his old life.  One would like to think so.  Ana, with whom he seems to have fallen out, disappears from history, with no record of either marriage or death.

At only 35 minutes the film feels overly compressed, jumping from commentator to commentator, graphics flashing by, with scarcely a chance to absorb the information.  Despite having the course of Romania’s war sketched in by a series of academics, it helps to have some prior knowledge of this theatre of the conflict and Romania’s role within it.

However, the film does compile a personal story of sorts from the fragments, one that could so easily have been lost in the crumbling pages of a forgotten novel deteriorating under a shed.  In disinterring Fănică’s notes, the filmmakers have also performed a useful service in highlighting a part of the First World War that has tended to be overlooked.

The documentary is available from Cinepub on YouTube, with English-language subtitles.  Cinepub’s page on the film, with a link, is here:

7 March 2019

The Cold War: A New Oral History, by Bridget Kendall


Bridget Kendall’s 2017 oral history is clustered around particular flashpoints worldwide in the Cold War (perhaps we should start calling it the First Cold War), from the Greek Civil War in 1944 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.  The BBC publication was designed to accompany a radio series, The Cold War: Stories from the Big Freeze.  Kendall has gathered interviews with many people who experienced its various facets, and has produced a bottom-up history supplemented by short, and thus not very detailed, contextualising essays.

There are references to Romania, though its few appearances in passing indicate that in terms of the conflict it was fairly marginal, probably no bad thing.  The first is in the introductory essay to the Greek Civil War chapter, which outlines the ‘Percentages Agreement’ reached between Churchill and Stalin in October 1944.  This was designed to split Eastern Europe into spheres of influence, as if this could be hammered out over a conference table.  Romania was to be 90% in the Soviet sphere and 10% in the British; not quite how it turned out.

The introduction to the chapter on the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, described as an early example of what we now call hybrid warfare, refers to the ‘liberation’ (quotes in original) of Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary in 1943-4.  It demonstrated the pointlessness of haggling over percentages but the reality of the Soviet sphere of influence.  Russia wanted pro-Moscow buffer states, and the occupation by the Red Army facilitated the installation of subservient regimes in those countries.

The next reference is in the introduction to the chapter on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which talks about Soviet political and economic control over client states.  East Germany, Romania and Hungary were obliged to pay ‘draconian’ war reparations, and to finance Soviet troops stationed locally.

Jump forward to Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the introduction dealing with the crushing of the Prague Spring.  Nicolae Ceaușescu, who had sided with Alexander Dubček (surprising to us now, but Ceaușescu, only three years in power, was trying to keep his own distance from Moscow), to his credit refused to supply troops to assist in occupying Czechoslovakia.  Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria acquiesced.

We have to wait for the chapter on Chile in 1973 before Romania is mentioned by one of the eyewitnesses, actually the only occasion.  Osvaldo Puccio was imprisoned by the Pinochet regime, expelled, and went into exile in Romania in 1974 before moving to Germany.  He does not say anything about Romania, nor why he initially settled there, and he was back in Chile a decade after leaving.

In the introduction to the chapter on the Angolan Civil War (1975-2002), Romania is mentioned as one of the countries ‘pitching into the fracas to back their preferred sides.’  I had to look elsewhere to establish that Romania, among many others, supported the MPLA.

The introduction to the chapter devoted to ‘Gorbachev’s Perestroika’ (1985-91) refers to his communication to Communist leaders in the Eastern European states that they could no longer rely on the Soviet Union to keep them in power.  As those parties enjoyed little real public support, the governments were vulnerable to popular dissent.  Hence, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the movement to unseat Communist governments began, largely peacefully, though Ceaușescu’s overthrow was more violent.

3 March 2019

Romanian Literature Now


Romania Literature Now is not a demand by me (though it could be!) but the name of an English-language website devoted to, as its name suggests, recent developments in Romanian literature.  Edited by Cezar Gheorghe and Emanuela Ignățoiu-Sora, it is subtitled ‘Everything you need to know about Romanian literature’, which is a fine aspiration, and in time the site promises to become a key hub of information on the subject.  It is devoted to writers at all stages of their careers, and showcases a thriving literary scene in Romania.

As today is World Writers’ Day, a sadly under-celebrated event, Romanian Literature Now on Facebook is promoting the website’s pages devoted to Romanian authors; these provide biographical information and translated tasters of their output.  Some pages include videos of readings and interviews, though they are in Romanian.  Mircea Cărtărescu’s naturally is extensive, with a bibliography and external links.

The editors would like to have more excerpts from a range of writers translated into English and made freely available on the website.  To this end they have recently set up a Patreon page, collecting donations both to help promote Romanian writers generally and to finance translations.  As print editions of Romanian authors tend to be issued by small-scale publishers in short runs they are quite expensive and not easy to get hold of, so this is a welcome initiative and worthy of support.

Romanian Literature Now’s website can be found here:


The Patreon donation link: