Surrealist Gellu Naum’s My Tired Father was published in Romanian in 1972 and translated into English in 1999. Cryptically fragmentary and dreamlike, it is a free-flowing impressionistic series of sentences which seem to settle briefly on a meaning before whirling away again, leaving the reader trying to establish connections and find a through-line. The title suggests it is about the author’s father, but it is rather the narrator’s story and his relationship with an actress called Catherine Mahoney. Another character, Dr Abend (evening?) pops up from time to time, but his connection is hazy. The narrator, a professional musician, marries Catherine and they live together for over a decade and have a child, until he leaves and she suddenly dies.
It is prefaced by an alleged interview
conducted by the translator James Brook, though as he admits Naum was not
available for a conversation, it would appear he made it up, claiming to have
obtained Naum’s ‘telepathic consent’ for the exercise to be conducted over ‘the
ether’. Why he didn’t just call it an
introduction and include Naum’s pretend responses as his own insights is a
puzzle. The result is informative, but
it is a laborious conceit, and even ‘Naum’ becomes irritated with Brook’s
questions. What the author (who died in
2001) thought of having words put in his mouth is not recorded. Perhaps Brook thought he was being
appropriately surrealist, but it misfires.
Cast as a ‘pohem’, there is little poetic
about My Tired Father, and it might
as readily be called prohse. One approaches
a surrealist work with the expectation it will not make obvious sense (or if
one is less charitably inclined that it will be unnecessarily obscure), and this
one can feel self-indulgent. But it is
short, pithy, and the narrative flows smoothly, carrying the reader along. One puts the book down with an intuition that
some insight into the narrator’s life has been revealed, even if it is not
clear what it is, and leaving traces which stick in the mind. Given the time and place of its creation, it
is probably a miracle it exists at all.
