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.
