Romanian Film in London

There's something about new Romanian cinema... A certain "je ne sais quoi" that, while watching the film, and then quite a long time afterwards, makes you think of the meaning of life, relationships, society, and even recent history. Or, at least, that's the effect it has on me.

The so-called New Wave of Romanian cinema broke onto the international stage around 2004, seemingly coming from nowhere - or that's how things looked like to Western audience and film specialists. There is quite a long history of film-making in Romania, that also counts a Cannes Best Director Award for Liviu Ciulei, in 1965, for Forest of the Hanged. There is also Lucian Pintilie, the realist master who fled Romania in the early 1980s after the censorship banned the screening of all his films to date. Or Dan Pita, sidetracked when his film Sand Cliffs, a scathing depiction of the vengefulness of idividuals in positions of power, was personally banned by dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. 

Even if people might not be aware of this history, the good thing is that they are aware of new Romanian cinema, and appreciate it. And I like to believe that one of the channels that had quite a contribution towards promoting it in the UK was the Romanian Film Festival in London. From its first edition in 2003, the Festival presented some of the newest and best Romanian films, including the short and debut films of people who've become by now household names of the arthouse circuit: Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu. 

This year's edition, titled The Other Side of Hope,  takes place from 22 to 25 November, at the Renoir Cinema in Bloomsbury, a very short walk away from Russell Square tube station.

The full programme was announced recently, and it looks very promising. Beyond the Hills, the new film by Cristian Mungiu, is presented in the gala screening on 22nd November, with Principles of Life by Constantin Popescu on the 23rd, Everybody in Our Family by Radu Jude on the 24th, and Periferic, Bogdan George Apetri's debut feature film, on the 25th. As a special treat, another screening will take place on 26 November, at the European Bank for Development and Reconstruction, in the City: Medal of Honour by Calin Peter Netzer, featuring and amazing performance by Victor Rebengiuc, the lead actor from Forest of the Hanged.

I recommend warmly these screenings to all film-lovers. This is Romanian cinema at its best: superb cinematography, uncompromising stories, and also the usual dose of gallows humour. There will also be guests from Romania who will take part in Q&A sessions for every film - yet another reason for you to be there. 

Full details of the Festival are on the website http://www.rofilmfest.com. For your benefit, I include here a short Festival Trailer (edited by yours truly).

Twelfth Night and Nights

I have been to the theatre today, and not just any theatre but The Globe. I saw The Twelfth Night as Shakespeare intended it: the play was performed in true Elisabethan style by a male-only cast, using costumes, mannerisms and music of the period ("If music be the food of love..." accompanied by Dowland's Flow my Tears). 

I saw some great people at work: Mark Rylance made an incredible Olivia, floating on the stage with ease and campishness, and Stephen Fry proved to be a very good Malvolio, acting in turns like a paragon of unctuousness and a bully. Also, Roger Lloyd Pack, known to audiences all over the world as Trigger in Only Fools and Horses, was a good Andrew Aguecheek. The entire cast acted extraordinarily, keeping to the conventions and methods in existence around 1601 (as The Globe informs the audience). Given that the text allows for such additions, the actors went for laughs with various gestures: exaggerations, rude or knowing signs, sexual innuendo, slapstick, all conducive to merriment.

My first encounter with The Twelfth Night took place at some point in the 1980s, when I was too young to actually realise what was going on. The Romanian television was broadcasting the full BBC series of dramatisations after Shakespeare, and something stayed with me from that moment. I then read the play in Mihnea Gheorghiu's translation in the Works published by Editura Univers (which my parents had on their shelves), and then didn't meet with the play for a long time. That is, until Trevor Nunn's film of 1998 which I enjoyed greatly. The action is moved successfully to the 19th century, and the film goes on - like the play itself - at the leisurely pace of a romantic romp, with a memorable Malvolio played by Nigel Hawthorne. 

Some years later, in 2006, I had the chance to work as an assistant tour manager for the National Theatre of Craiova's season in Bath - with The Twelfth Night, directed by SilviuPurcarete. Nothing could be further from Nunn's romantic vision than Purcarete's semi-nightmarish (yet still funny) interpretation. Part of my duties was to feed lines on the LED-screen showing the English text, line by line by line: What country, friends, is this (return) Illyria, madam (return)... The advantage of repeating this exercise for seven or eight shows was that of bringing a certain familiarity with the original text, learning some lines, and their place in the play, by heart. 

This did not prepare me, though, for reading the play in a scholarly edition curated by the great Stanley Wells (who, by the way, was in the audience this evening), in which layers of meaning are added by explanations of the context and wordplay. A theatre scholar once said that non-English speakers can, sometimes, enjoy Shakespeare more because they are not obliged to read him in a language whose syntax and expressions are 400 years old. He was right, to some extent. But I think that anyone who loves English should read Shakespeare in the original.

The second time I saw The Twelfth Night at the theatre was a rather special one, because it had now mutated into kabuki theatre, in the vision of Yukio Ninagawa, at the Barbican (2009). Useless to say the translation worked wonderfully, with parallels between Elisabethan and kabuki conventions being rendered evident, not the least by the all-male cast and the issue of "man playing a woman who pretends to be a man". Beside these, one of the things that impressed me most was Ninagawa's decision to bring to the stage the shipwreck which is implicit in Shakespeare's text. To this end, a quite big ship put on an appearance in the opening scenes. Some images from the kabuki production (but not from the Barbican) can be seen here. 

There was also Peter Hall's Twelfth Night staged at the National Theatre in 2011, which was particularly beautiful and melancholy, played in a simple, sparsely decorated scenography, with a fantastic Rebecca Hall as Viola, Marton Csokas as Orsino, and Simon Callow as Sir Toby.

In conclusion, I recommend The Globe's production of The Twelfth Night warmly. I understood it will transfer later on this year to the Apollo theatre in the West End.

The morale of this rambling story of Twelfth Nights? Shakespeare is very good to see and/or read, no matter the language you're reading him in.

Reading and Talk with Author Mike Phillips

This Saturday, 11 August 2012, is set to be rather special: I will go to a reading and book signing event with author Mike Phillips, which takes place in the grounds of the fabulously named Bruce Castle in Haringey, North London (Lordship Lane, Tottenham, N17 8NU). More info here: www.facebook.com/events/328138820613977/

I met Mike Phillips in 2004, I think, through our common interest in Romanian culture. I remember being struck not only by his interest in my home country, but by the in-depth knowledge of many cultural and social aspects of Romanian life - knowledge that I am afraid to say it is not shared by some Romanians I know. 

So, here was this successful British writer who wanted to do something in order to make Romanian culture better known in the UK. What's not to like about that? I was fortunate to work with Mike on many events, from book launches to bringing Romanian theatres to the UK and organising Romanian film festivals. But I think that, by far, the best was being able to work, as a co-translator, with Mike Phillips and Ramona Mitrica, on the three Romanian books published Profusion Crime Series. I already knew Mike's competences in the areas of literature, film and theatre - but now, working on the translation of examples of "popular culture"  I got to appreciate how well he'd got to know the Romanian psyche.

Then came the fourth book in the Profusion Crime Series: the amazingly frank and wonderfully objective "Rimaru - Butcher of Bucharest". I've already written about it on this blog. Now I will have the occasion to listen to Mike talk about the genesis of the volume, and, as an extra bonus, he will be reading from it. Between you and me, he has a wonderful reading voice, so that would definitely be a treat. Mike will also talk about his novel "A Shadow of Myself", a very good book in which cultures, interests and personalities clash in an exciting, Noir environment. 

See you at the Bruce Castle!

Mihail Sebastian: Reading Past Lives and Enduring Problems

One of my companions for the past year has been Mihail Sebastian's Journal. At 620+ pages it is quite a read, but it is not because of its length it takes me so long to finish it: it's because I can only take it in relatively small doses.

Mihail Sebastian (born Iosif Hechter, 1907–1945) was a Jewish-Romanian writer and playwright in pre-WW2 Bucharest, a time of booming intellectual activity but also one of increasingly vocal nationalism, and fascist and anti-Semitic fervour. Sebastian burst onto the literary scene in 1934 with a controversial novel , "De doua mii de ani" (For Two Thousand Years), dealing with the condition of the Jew in the contemporary Romanian society. The controversy stemmed not only from the first person narrative (which may be construed as being to some point autobiographical), but also from the introduction written by Sebastian's mentor, the philosopher and journalist Nae Ionescu. Although Ionescu's text was overtly anti-Semitic, blaming the Jews for their own suffering, Sebastian decided to publish it. In this way, he attracted the ire of segments from both the Zionist and the nationalist movements.

Notwistanding the increasingly nationalist and anti-Semitic atmosphere, Sebastian was part of a very lively group of young writers and journalists, including Mircea Eliade, Eugene Ionesco and Camil Petrescu, and was very active on Bucharest's intellectual stage.

The Journal shows Sebastian worrying constantly about his work, and struggling to write - and forcing himself to record his thoughts in the journal. In this way, we get to assist to the birth of his first play, Jocul de-a vacanta (Playing at holiday), and the novel Accidentul (The Accident). We go with Sebastian through various amorous episodes, through trips to the mountainside and skiing, and we find out about his love of classical music.

And then we find out about the political and social troubles. Although the social situation had deteriorated enough by the time the war started in 1939, with casual anti-Semitism cropping up more and more often, even in his close circle of friends, Sebastian's world truly begins to collapse once Nazi Germany begins to conquer Europe. As a Jew, Sebastian was barred from working as a lawyer (a profession he was not very keen on practising), lost his job as a book editor, and could no longer publish because of the racial laws enacted by the pro-fascist regime. And at some point his radio - his main connection to the outside world, a source of both hope and despair - is confiscated, as yet another racial law comes into force.

There are many things which can make one seethe with indignation. But this note from November 1941 summarises very well why I feel I can take the Journal only in small doses, thus keeping depression at bay:

"Ceausescu * - the general secretary at the Economics Ministry - listened avidly to the French-language bulletin from London at 11:15, happy that fifteen thousand Germans and Italians had been taken prisoner in Libya. He too is expecting a British victory. But in the interim he sees nothing odd in holding public office under the present regime. Incompatibility is not a problem that occurs to people here on the Danube."
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*  no relation to the future dictator.

PS - my favourite work of Sebastian's is his play Ultima ora (Final Edition), taking place in a news-room. It is a play about typos and misunderstadings, which reveals in an admirable manner the true workings of the press industry and its relationship with people in positions of power. 

Killing Generals

This post takes its name from Bogdan Hrib's novel Kill the General, a good mystery/thriller I am quite fond of. The main reason is not that I was involved in its English edition, working on the first draft translation with Ramona Mitrica and Mike Phillips. The main reason is that Kill the General is a well crafted book, endowed by its author with separate levels of narration which converge into an exciting story.

The plot could be resumed in the phrase "Stelian Munteanu, a book editor, is forced to accept a contract on the head of a general whose memoirs of the Romanian revolution might have explosive political results".

Going on with the book, we find out how Stelian got himself in a position to be proposed a contract killing, and what is his relation to the general. Thus, we learn that he first met the general back in the Ceausescu's time, when Stelian was an army conscript, and the general only a captain in a military unit in the middle of nowhere. We are also introduced to a shady character called Misha Pushkin, a former KGB man who apparently never quit the job, and who is both a well-meaning friend and a Mephistophelean influence on Stelian.

The book is told in the first person by Stelian, and it begins with a restless early morning in a Vienna hotel. Stelian has a story to tell - the story of General Simionescu, the man he was contracted to kill. But to understand this story, we have to understand who Stelian is, and how he got to be who he is now.

And here Bogdan Hrib does an amazing turn presenting the world of 1980s Romania. The author's descriptions of army life during one of the worst periods in recent Romanian history are vivid, realist - from the mind-numbing drills and marches, to freezing in the barracks due to lack of fuel:

"The first thing I looked at in the morning was the half-filled glass of water on the metal bedside-table. By the thickness of the ice in the glass I tried to estimate the temperature of the room. Several millimetres of ice, several degrees below zero. Outside it was -25. I kept wishing that the glass would break one day. The laws of physics which I still had in my head told me that water increases in volume as it freezes. Therefore, my glass should have cracked. But it never happened."

The action proceeds with episodes from the present interspersed with episodes from Stelian's past, and it all grows into a rounded story that gives the background of the story, presenting in the same time a good view of recent Romanian history and mores.

As the background image gets clearer, the story gathers momentum. We know Stelian has to kill the general, the same man who took him under his wing back in his conscript days, but we do not know why. And, most of all, we do not know if Stelian will be able to pull the trigger.

And I am not going to tell you what he will do - you will have to read the book for yourselves. It is well worth it, trust me. Kill the General is a very good book, written with great attention to details; a thriller/mystery and character study in equal parts, a smart, contemporary Noir that does not only thrill, but actually has something intelligent to say about people, places, and ordinary and extraordinary circumstances. 

You can read a free preview of Kill the General on the site of Profusion, the book's British publishers. 

To whet your appetite for reading, I add here that Kill the General also contains a yummy recipe for a pasta dish, which you are free to try.

With Bulgakov. At the Theatre

I went recently at the National Theatre to see Collaborators, a new play by John Hodge. Starting from the famous incident of the phone-call Bulgakov received from Stalin,  Hodge has imagined a what-if story that brings together the author and Joseph Stalin himself in a collaborative effort to come up with a play celebrating the big man's 60th anniversary. 

The production was excellent from all points of view (I am talking as a theatre lover, but not a connoisseur), with a straight, uncomplicated yet strong scenography reminscent of the great Russian avant-garde stage designs.

 

Snapshots of the stage-setting (with apologies to the National Theatre)

The play opened with a  cartoonish dream sequence in which Bulgakov was chased by Stalin around the house. The music and acting was suitably vaudevillian until Joseph Vissarionovich lifted a typewriter and was ready to crash it down on Bulgakov's head... moment when Mikhail Afanasyevich woke up. "Did he catch you this time?" was the leitmotif as the wife and the flatsharers entered the stage, setting the action firmly in a cramped Moscow apartment.

Alex Jennings and Simon Russell-Beale were amazing as Bulgakov and Stalin, with Russell-Beale creating an irresistible mixture of black humour and evilness. All in all, I think the play captured well the madness reigning supreme in 1930s Soviet Union, and also the spirit of Bulgakov's writings from the Diaboliad, Heart of a Dog, A Dead Man's Memoir (aka Black Snow), and The Master and Margarita.

Bulgakov was a gifted playwright, and Stalin was apparently a big fan, going to see The White Guard (or The Days of the Turbins) some fifteen times - although it was about a bourgeois, Czarist family that sided with the Bolsheviks during the civil war only to escape death.

I saw the version by Michael Upton staged by the National Theatre in 2010, and I enjoyed it as well. It was very well acted, and the scenography was again very good, going towards the spectacular as the action progressed to scenes of street fighting involving pyrotechnics. The strongest point of the show was the script, adapted skilfully from Bulgakov's play (which, in its turn, was adapted by Bulgakov himself from the banned novel of the same name). A very good text about the play and its author was written by Will Self for The Guardian.

For a wonderfully dark and satiric view of the world of theatre in 1930s Soviet Union, A Dead Man's Memoir is an absolute must. Among other luminaries of the Soviet literary scene, it features, albeit in a disguised manner, Stanislavski, father of the Method, and Alexei Tolstoy, the Red Count.

The (in)famous phone-call from Stalin had more than one effect on Bulgakov's life and career. He was banned for taking a too critical view of the system, but survived the purges and disappearances. To what extent this was due to Stalin being, as the character declared in Hodge's play, his "number 1 fan", will probably be never known.

Down and Out

... in Paris and London. Very appropriately, I bought a second-hand copy of this book from a bouquinist plying his trade around the Millennium Bridge at weekends. It's a nice-looking 1969 pocket book edition (reprinted in 1984), the kind Penguin was famous for. The text is also available free on the internet.

First published in 1933, Down and Out in Paris and London recounts Orwell's life amid the poorest of the urban poor as a fully pledged member. An Old Etonian who chose a bohemian life in Paris, Orwell describes the squalid living conditions of the poor Parisian "quartiers" with both splendid detachment and the black humour that will become a hallmark of his style. 

Knowing the public's appetite for "continental scenes", Orwell opens the book with a colourful description of the inhabitants of Rue Coq d'Or (identified variously as Rue du Pot de Fer or Rue Mouffetard, they are adjoining), including the nosy and mouthy concierge, the old couple making money by selling regular poscards as if they were smut, or the young dissolute who tells to anyone listening about what love and passion mean (paying 1,000 francs for a night of unbridled pleasure under the streets of Paris). But, the author offsets the colour adding that he was "trying to describe the people in our quarter not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all  part of the story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum."

Through a series of mishaps, the young aspiring writer's meager source of money dried up, and Orwell became pennyless. He notes, matter-of-factly, that penury brings with it a rather peculiar type of philosophy, "the great redeeming power of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. [...] And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. [...] It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety."

Orwell returned to London after one year and a half spent more or less in Parisian slums. Once there, he turned his attention to the London poor, investigating the life of the tramps - while living as a tramp. He might not have set up to do investigative journalism, but this is what Down and Out in Paris and London turned out to be. 

Although it talks about events and conditions of more than eighty years ago, I found the book still relevant today, at a time of economic crisis, at a time when the disparity between rich and poor is so steep. We might be living better times than the 1920s and 30s, but the human drama coming from penury is the same. 

For admirers of the man, the Orwell Prizes publishes his diaries from 1938 to 1942, in real time - but after 70 years. There is a little bit of everything in there, from his gardening to political and literary themes. It is well worth a look.

Real Places, Real People, Inventions

It's both funny and instructive to read books about the world that come from ages ago. I mention this because one of my long-time printed companions is The Histories by Herodotus, which I've been reading intermittently for the past two years or so. There is no denying that Herodotus travelled widely, and that he'd seen much of the things he talked about, but part of the knowledge he set down came from talking to officials, priests, merchants, seamen, soldiers - most of the times probably through an interpreter. Herodotus knew the information could be doubtful, and he said so - after writing it down as a universally ackowledged truth.

On this point, while talking about the remotest places in the world (book 3, 115), Herodotus said "I have no reliable information about the western margins of Europe [...] despite my best efforts, I have been unable to find anyone who has personally seen a sea on the other side of Europe and can tell me about it."

In other words, he had no way of knowing whether the north of Europe was inhabited at all - although he knew the amber and tin the Greeks prized so much must have come from somewhere very remote indeed. To his credit, Herodotus didn't believe in the reports that maintained the north was inhabited by one-eyed people "who are in other respects identical in nature to the rest of mankind".

But the story itself was worth mentioning for entertaining purposes. The myth of strange folks living beyond the edges of the known world has endured and was attentively perpetuated. As such, dog-headed men appearing in Heodotus and other texts throughout antiquity, are still present in the Middle Ages. Partly out of respect for the established sources (auctoritates), partly out of a desire to amaze the readers, Marco Polo and Mandeville also tell of dog-headed people who ate their captured enemies. By the time Europeans were exploring the Americas and the remote corners of Asia, these creatures were very much a part of the collective imagination.

Dog-headed man, from the Nuremberg Chronicle, via Wikipedia

This made me think about knowledge which is taken as granted because it comes from an established source. It also made me think about people not being interested in finding out the truth because common knowledge or popular culture presents a different view of things. 

Some good years ago, I went to a party. Chatting with the people there, I was asked at some point where I was from. I said I was from Romania, and the man wanted to know where exactly in Romania. When I said Transylvania, he took offence, saying that "why do I take him for a fool, as everybody knew Transylvania was not a real place". I protested it was too, and he brought the argument that "it's a made-up place because you have Count Dracula who's from over there, and then there's a Queen of Transylvania putting on an appearance in My Fair Lady." In the end, I convinced him about my native lands being real, helped by another Romanian who was present.

I suppose the moral would be that one should not take things for granted, and that it's good for people to read a bit more and also take a little interest in current affairs and geography.

Readers can form an image of a place from books, as long as they discern what is common sense, what is pure propaganda, what is flight of fancy, and what is an exaggeration for literary purposes.

This brings me to a subject I am rather fond of: how Romania is seen in books. I haven't read yet Georgina Harding's Painter of Silence, set in pre- and post-World War 2 Romania. It's on my to-read list, I hope to return to this subject soon.

I did read, however, Patrick McGuinness' The Last Hundred Days, and I know it shows a very believeable and true Romania under the rule of Ceausescu. 

There are some representations of Bucharest which are not exactly geographically correct, but this aspect did not bother me a jot. I was too caught by the incredible air of reality of the  story, even in its most fanciful parts (such as an underground party / auction taking place in the Museum of History). This was because the characters - or rather the archetypes they represented - were true. So true that, with less than five minutes' thinking, I could point to real living (and dead) personages who made a seamless transition from Ceausescu's politruks to high priests of democracy and capitalism.

Women, Guts, and Books. A Crime Reader's Delight

If there is a literary subject which has been treated again and again – and will continue to be so in the future – is that of women.

From Flaubert’s Madame Bovary to DH Lawrence’s Women in Love, and from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, women as main characters have occupied a prominent role in literature. We can go further back to Medea, Eloise, or Viola in The Twelfth Night, and many other strong (or less so but still fascinating) women characters.

Before I will be accused of misogynism, I will hurry to say that I am compelled to write this post because of a forthcoming book which features an exceptional woman, a character who, although crippled by mental instability, is the strongest character in the world she inhabits. Also, this book is written by a woman author.

I am talking here about Oana Stoica-Mujea’s Anatomical Clues (published originally in Romanian as Indicii anatomice in 2009). I hope Ramona Mitrica from Profusion Publishers will not mind me blabbing about the book prior to its UK publishing date.

Although there have been other women writers of crime fiction in Romania, most notably the late Rodica Ojog-Brasoveanu, who introduced interesting women characters in her work, it seems to me Oana has created one of the strongest female leads in Romanian literature. Although her main character in Anatomical Clues, Detective Iolanda Stireanu, is fighting an army of internal demons, bereavement and childhood trauma, she is still the strongest person in the book. Self exiled in her “ivory tower” on the top-most floor of a Bucharest block of flats, Iolanda fights crime aided by her razor-sharp intellect, by high end technology and a not-too-willing proxy, a woman journalist who acts on the ground as her eyes and ears.

I won’t go on too much about the plot as I don’t want to ruin your reading experience. Suffice to say that Oana Stoica-Mujea’s style of writing is gripping, gutsy, and full of unexpected twists. I know the expression sounds trite, but this story really is a page-turner that will keep you hooked.

Anatomical Clues is part of the Profusion Crime Series initiated by ProfusionPublishers, a new independent British publisher that brings the finest Eastern European crime writing on the English-speaking book market. 

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edit July 2012

Anatomical Clues is now available in paperback from ProfusionPublishers, Amazon.co.uk, and can be ordered from Waterstones.com. It is also available as a Kindle e-book. 

 You can read a free sample on Profusion’s website by clicking here

Piano Pianissimo from Russia to Romania and Sweden

A little while ago, I went to a concert at the Royal Festival Hall. And before you ask - yes, this is still about books.

The programme was: Sibelius' Night Ride and Sunrise, Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto no 2, and Tchaikovsky's Symphony no 6. I am not a classical music buff, but I do love Rachmaninov, and the 2nd is probably my all time favourite piece of classical music ever. And as I have nothing against Sibelius and Tchaikovsky either, I had enough reasons to book a seat in good time.

When the conductor - a grand man called Leif Segerstam - came on stage, I was struck by the fact that he looks very much like a cross between Karl Marx and a biblical patriarch. He is an impressive presence, and although he was moving a little stiffly, he had a very animated and (I suppose) persuasive style of conducting, at times taking the whole orchestra under his impressive wingspan.

The piano piece was performed by Denis Matsuev, a musician I can only describe as a genius and virtuoso. Suffice to say that at the end of the concerto, people clapped so loudly and for such a long time that I remembered the olden days when The Comrade was holding plenary meetings and speechifying. When the texts were published, they were scattered with parantheses such as "Prolonged applause and ovations. The audience is chanting slogans Ceausescu and the People".

Matsuev got three curtain calls and many boucquets, and at the third call he sat at the piano and played his own version of Figaro's aria, unleashing further applauses.

This concert made me think about books with pianists in an important role. Or at least books in which people who play the piano impressed me for a reason.

I thought long and hard and found only three books in my reading list, excluding from the start the piano playing that is de rigueur in the majority of 19th century novels.

The first one that came to my mind is a Romanian classic, La Medeleni by Ionel Teodoreanu, a roman flueve charting the lives and complicated love lives of the Deleanu family's children. The Deleanus were small nobility from Moldavia, and the opening salvo takes place on their estate, Medeleni, in a semi-bucolic arrangement. I don't remember Madame Deleanu playing the piano, but I remember she was doing pianotage, playing an inexistent keyboard when she was in a bad mood.

This led to another book which is not about a pianist, the Saga of Gosta Berling by Selma  Lagerlof, better known (not in the UK, unfortunately) for the fantastic children book The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson. The Saga of Gosta Berling features, besides the eponymous hero who is a defrocked priest, a strange array of "cavaliers", one of them being a great admirer of Beethoven. His name is Lovenborg and he holds Ludwig in such esteem that he dares not play his works on a piano, but only a wooden table with a painted keyboard. And when he plays it "He hears every note with unearthly clearness. He sits there glowing with enthusiasm and emotion, hearing the most wonderful tones".

The third book is Elfriede Jelinek's Piano Teacher. But it counts only as half a book here, as I only saw the film and read two or three chapters.The Guardian described it as a "demented love story [in which] the hunter is the hunted, pain is pleasure, and spite and self-contempt seep from every pore." 

Suggestions of books with pianists welcome.

Making a Killing

 I suspect this is something that the majority of people would not like to talk about – including myself. But this time I have a perfectly good reason to do that: this particular killer is a Romanian, and his nasty career took place in 1970-1971, at a time when Romania was a so-called Socialist Republic, led with an increasingly heavier iron fist by Nicolae Ceausescu. I am writing about this because a new book called Rimaru - Butcher of Bucharest, a collaborative effort by a British author, Mike Phillips, and a Romanian historian, Stejarel Olaru, has just been launched. It is available for the time being as a Kindle electronic book, with the paperback edition coming along soon.

Like other Romanians of my age, I knew a little about the legend of Rimaru. The term “legend” is not used lightly, as with the passing of time this story had become a sort of urban legend in which it was difficult to separate fact from fiction, and clear historical details from quasi-folkloric contemporary or later additions.

So I knew from hear-say about Rimaru’s crimes. But it was only when I had the chance to translate from the Romanian archive files, during the thorough research conducted by the two authors, Mike Phillips and Stejarel Olaru, that I had a glimpse of the horror of it all.

Even so, I saw the full picture only in reading the finished – and now newly published – book, which sets the story in the proper historical context, and brings to light not only the full account of the murderer’s deeds, but also witness statements and objective analysis that convey not just a portrait of a disturbed individual, but a vivid image of a society in a particular historical timeframe, living under particular social and political conditions.

The book makes for a very good read, even if a chilling and rather unsettling one, because the authors have shunned sensationalism in favour of objectivity. In this, I think they acted like the good documentary film-maker: showing, not telling. The analysis of the facts is clear and level-headed, and the excellent editing by Ramona Mitrica ensures a smooth flow.

The paradox of communist countries was that the equitable society trumpeted by its leaders could never be accomplished (the reasons are too numerous to enumerate). In order to make everything look alright, some things were swept under the carpet, while others, like economic performance, could just be invented.

Rimaru’s case was not different. An unassuming vet school student started in 1970 a crime spree that included four murders, six attempted murders, five rapes, robberies and thefts, which made the police look powerless and kept the people of Bucharest under shock. The first reaction must have been to hush up everything – how can any New Man, forged by the Communist Party by purging all unhealthy, degenerate, bourgeois elements, behave in such an atrocious manner? But the crimes continued, and by the time the police realised the perpetrator could be the same man, Bucharest was awash with rumours and overshadowed by fear. People knew a killer was on the loose, but nothing transpired in the press or on any official channels – everything is in order, carry on with your lives, the Party is watching over you.

It is debatable if the events would have turned out differently had the people been made aware of what was going on. However, lessons have been learned, as the book assures us.

One lesson has not been learned, however. And that was that unexplained and unanalysed events lead to the birth of legends, and shunning open discussion leads to us building up, and believing, false images of ourselves.

What Rimaru – Butcher of Bucharest by Mike Phillips and Stejarel Olaru does is to hold up a mirror of a specific time in Romanian history, which shows events that could have taken place in any part of the world (as, indeed, they have), and allows facts and people speak for themselves.

Tea with the Arnolfini Family

There is something magical about the portrait of the Arnolfini family. It's impossible not to stare at it, not to look at the two people who are its subject, and at the richness of detail surrounding them. I first experienced this feeling quite some time ago, in black and white reproductions, and then in colour ones. 

But nothing prepared me for the face-to-face meeting with the two Arnolfinis, in a smaller, almost intimate room at the National Gallery in London. First of all, I always thought the painting would be quite big, in any case bigger than its (approx) 80 x 60 cm. The depth of detail, probably because of the size, is even richer in real life than in reproductions. It stands surrounded by other masterpieces of the Flemish school, an ethereal presence which is, in the same time, very much of this earth, showing a couple in their house, surrounded by their expensive possessions. 

Even with so many studies written from the mid-19th century on, the meaning of this painting is a mystery. Does it show a civil wedding ceremony? Is the woman pregnant? Does the painting really show Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife Giovanna Cenami? 

One of the interpretations I enjoyed is that brought by Erwin Panofsky in 1934 in a study published in Burlington Magazine (later on included in the volume Early Netherlandish Painting - which is sadly out of print in English but available in French). Panofsky argued that the painting represents a visual marriage contract. In those days, the presence of a sacerdote to legalise the union was not yet compulsory, and there existed a less formal civil ceremony that did not involve the signing of a contract but the utterance of a formula and the joining of hands. However, it seems that people who married this way, and especially those with properties and fortunes, were open to the threat of legal action from dissatisfied family members, especially if any of the parents objected to the match. As such, Panofsky saw the painting both a very expensive status symbol and a countersigned document, certified by the inscription "Johannes de Eyck fuit hic 1434" (Jan van Eyck was here). 

A longer analysis, informed not only by a profound love for the painting but also by thorough learning and the advances in research and conservation technology, is provided by Carola Hicks's Girl in the Green Gown. Van Eyck's work and the context in which it appeared are analysed in depth, from the use of colours and the economic life of 15th century Bruges, to the meaning of objects, as well as an overview of the fashions and mores of the Burgundian court. Carola Hicks also traced the most probable road travelled by the painting during the centuries, from Bruges to Spain and from Spain to London, surviving perilous sea travel in the 16th century and travels by coach and cart during the Napoleonic Wars. And another journey by sea to England in the baggage of a Scottish soldier, Colonel James Hay, who sold it to the National Gallery in 1842. 

On the advice of a good friend, I bought Ciaran Carson's Shamrock Tea, which is connected to the Arnolfini portrait in mysterious ways. I have just begun reading it, but I already like it well. The writer - also a very appreciated Irish poet - is very inventive, putting together short colour-coded stories that veer between memories, the lives of the saints and reality-bending experiences. The synopsis on the back of my second-hand paperback edition states that "Shamrock Tea, the magical substance that allows people to experience the world with visionary clarity, can only be found by passing through the great van Eyck painting into another world..." Curiouser and curiouser, as a character in the book says.

What Can be Learned from Books

You may say that from books you can learn compassion, love, hate, justice, economics and many, many other things. And you would be right: all that would be true. 

I like books from which you can learn something. I like books that teach without preaching, that do not drum learning into your head, nor have the express desire to do so, and that do not give out strict recipes for learning. 

Every story has the power to teach, but what it teaches is down both to the author and the reader. Catechism is good for getting right the shape of things, but not so for their meaning. When I was a kid in school, there was this phrase which was used with liberality by our teachers:  What did the author want to say? (Ce-a vrut să spună autorul?). Of course, it was the teachers who gave you the right answer right away - as with any cathechism - telling  you exactly what it was that the poor man (generally a poet) had wanted to say. And we learned all that by heart, so when we had to write term papers we would then lay down on paper the words of our teachers. But those words were theirs only seldon, having generally come from big books of commentaries and literary analysis. 

Poet X might have meant to wax lyrical according to the philosophy of Schopenhauer, but the commentators who had became authorities in the field of poetry had decided the precise meaning of his every comma and every metaphor. 

I too learned these things, that was the way we were taught. But as I grew up and started reading and judging things on my own, I discovered that some of the hallowed classics had been explained to death by those who wanted to fix their meanings in a mould. I also noticed that some interpretations of, say, 100 years, or 40 years ago had become a law onto themselves, and in some cases they were defended by followers who were as fierce as Cerberus. And if it were only about this, things would still be right. But what if the interpretations that had been dictated by injust, illiberal, anti-intellectual, political reasons? What if these have been handed down the generations, to this very day, making many youngsters sound like Stalin's own politruks, reciting the same set text they parents had learnt in school?

It would be hard for me to write down everything I learned from books, and from whose books in particular. Nevertheless, for the flavour of it all, I will try to be give some short examples. 

From people like Caragiale, Bulgakov, Hašek, Čapek, O' Brien and Twain I learned how mordant humour which can be so absurd as to be close to nonsense can unmask hypocrites and make you question the ways the world is run. And they did this while keeping me in stitches with laughter. From people like Erwin Panofsky and Umberto Eco I learned about the importance of being objective, of keeping an open mind, and knowing what you talk about (not that I manage to do these all the time).

And there is something really important I learned from Hemingway, too. 

In his For Whom the Bell Tolls, a book considered by critics and readers alike to be one of his finest, Hemingway speaks about impending death from beginning to end. He talks about ordinary people, brought together by war, the harshest of conditions, who now have to act in less than ordinary ways. I began to grasp the cost of such a tragedy as the Spanish Civil War, and the next book I read after this was George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. I recommend to anyone interested to read them in this order. 

Pilar, the matriarch ruling the roost in Hemingway's book, is a fascinating character of great depth, and her observations are almost always poignant and of consequence. There is something very down-to-earth that I learned from Pilar and from her descriptions of life before the war. I now know that a glass of chilled Manzanilla is amazingly good: it's bone dry almost to the point of bitterness, but it blesses you with all the sweet bouquet specific to sherries and leaves an aftertaste comparable (and this is only a guess) to ambrosia and nectar.

Attacking the Libraries. Romanian style

As other Romanians my age, I first encountered Attack in the Library when I was a kid.

One of the advantages of growing up in Romania in the 1980s was that, from a certain point, there was nothing much on TV with the exception of propaganda and hymns to The Comrade and the Comradess (Tovarășul și Tovarășa) Ceaușescu. We had some old French and Italian films, old Hollywood musicals (all cut to fit the short emission times), and some TV series from the Eastern Bloc: Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Polish (historical adventure Czarne Chmury – Black Clouds, Karina – story of a horse) or Czech (medical drama Sanitka – The Ambulance, kids’ films Arabela and Rumburak). 

In the 1970s-1980s Romanians were buying books like mad, they were the only source of culture and entertainment which could be free of propaganda. My folks had, and still have, an extensive library in their flat which contains everything from the French, English and Russian classics to Romanian poetry and novels of the 1980s. A special place was given to crime novels: Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Georges Simenon, and also Romanian authors Rodica Ojog-Brasoveanu, Haralamb Zinca, and George Arion. Of course, I was not allowed to read these at the time – they were “books for grown-ups”. In any case, I remember the rather neutral covers selected for the crime genre, probably to make them look not too exciting. At some point at the beginning of the 1990s, I went through these previously forbidden books and had much fun reading them, then – as things are with youngters with fund and age-related issues in their minds – I forgot about them.

I forgot until I got on board this intriguing project of translating Romanian crime fiction into English, as member of a three-person team. And this is how I read Attack in the Library again, close to 30 years since the original publication date and some 18 years since I first read it. This was the moment I discovered a truly amazing book, funny and dead serious in the same time, which was speaking to me in a language I knew only too well, the language of allusion and double entendre that characterised almost any communication back in the bad old days (“you never know who’s listening”).

Paying homage to the French, American and English Noir tradition, but setting characters and story in very Romanian scenes and conditions, George Arion produced an intriguing novel, a “whodunnit” overshadowed by danger throughout but illuminated by sparkling, unstoppable humour.

Working on the draft translation, I was tempted (and, to some point, gave in to that temptation) to translate the situations too much, which is to say that I tried to imagine the situations in English-American settings. And the characters started to sound artificially Anglo-Saxon, some sort of mockneys, like Dick van Dyke playing the cheerful chimney sweep in Mary Poppins. Here, I was lucky that the co-translators, Ramona Mitrica and Mike Phillips, intervened and pointed out that I was beginning to localise the narration, like a Hollywood version of a non-American film (many of these don’t even bear comparison to the original).

It is not for me to blow my own trumpet and sing the praises of the translation, but I believe we made justice to the book, and produced an English translation which is as close to the spirit and language of George Arion’s original. As Mike Phillips observed in the introduction to the book, “Reading Attack in this translation is about listening to Arion himself, speaking in his own voice, telling the reader just who he is”.

I won’t say anything about the book’s plot here, you can read about it on Profusion’s site, and can even read a sample chapter. A preview can also be downloaded for your Kindle.

When Utopias Go Bad

Utopias are, as literature teaches us, those stories in which the world lives in better, more just conditions than we are on a regular basis, and many a writer from Plato to St Augustine of Hyppo to Thomas More regaled the reading public with such texts. 

On the other hand, utopias gone bad are called dystopias, and there are such texts that have achieved far more fame and following than their counterparts - to mention only George Orwell's 1984 or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I am sure there must have been dystopias written before the 20th century, but the last hundred years have proved to be the most fertile ground for them. 

A book which I enjoyed greatly and which is said to have been an inspiration for Orwell is Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, a book which was promptly banned by the nascent Bolshevik state almost as soon as it appeared in 1921. Orwell's 1984 is darker, tougher than We, but at least he allowed his characters to have names. Zamyatin's are not even people, according to the rules of the One State in which they live, they are ciphers called D-503, O-90 or R-13. In the One State life proceeds in mathematical progression, and imagination is one of the most-feared and despised things that can happen to anyone.

"[...] Mechanisms don't have imaginations.

 Have you ever seen an inanely dreaming and distant smile break across the physiognomy of a pump cylinder while it was at work? Have you ever heard of a crane, in the night-time, in the hours allocated for repose, turning over in anguish and sighing?

NO!

[...] But it is not your fault: you are sick. the name of this sickness: Imagination.

This is the worm that gnaws black wrinkles onto your forehead. [...] it is the last barricade on the path to happiness. But be glad: it has been detonated already. The path is clear. The most recent discovery of State Science is the location of the Imagination: the pathetic cerebral nodule in the region of the Pons Varolii. Cauterise this nodule with X-rays three times and you are healed of your imagination.

FOREVER."

I don't want to sound like a trite advert, but I have to say it. If you enjoyed 1984, you will enjoy We.

And while I am on this subject, I have to mention another dystopia, but one of a very different facture: Ferenc Karinthy's Metropole. In this book, a linguist misses a connection on a flight to Helsinki and ends up in a place where everybody speaks, reads and writes in  languages he cannot understand and cannot make sense of, in a perpetual state of motion through what must be the busiest metropolis in the world.

They are different books, but it is interesting they have something in common (besides being dystopian): an undercurrent of black humour, of darkest irony and of satire of the most mordant kind.

Arab Writing

Now this is a chapter on which I am sure to be found wanting. My reading list of Arab authors is quite short, and I think I should do something about it. 

Up to this moment, it is comprised of The 1001 Nights, The Life and Deeds of Sultan Az-Zahir Baibars, The Storyteller by Rabih Alameddine, and Boualem Sansal's Le Village de L'allemand (ou Le journal des frères Schiller, published in English as An Unfinished Business). I bought recently This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar ben Jelloun, and started reading from Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy in a bookshop. And that's about it.

Two of the titles don't have known authors, but the 1001 Nights I read were in a children-friendlier edition translated and edited by Romanian writer Eusebiu Camilar. The books were two thick, hardcover volumes published at some point in the 1960s, and they provided hours and hours of entertainement. The anonymous account of Baibars' life was in a semi-scholarly Romanian edition published in the 1980s, peppered with notes, as the translators chose to leave in Arabic some words with difficult Romanian equivalents. This is why I still remember one of the connecting phrases in the narration: "The muhaddith tells us...". 

This leads to Alameddine's Storyteller (or The Hakawati), which tells of life in Lebanon shortly before the civil war, with the narration going back and forth to early 2000s, with some episodes from the early 20th century. And all is interspersed with a magnificent story that could come (or be part) of the 1001 Nights. The main narrator is a young Lebanese who took refuge and grew up in America, returning to Lebanon to be near his dying father. We find out that the father comes from a family of storytellers, the kind that travelled around towns in the Arab and Ottoman world, earning their bread by setting up shop in coffee houses and keeping people hooked on their stories and glued to their seats for hours (and even days) on end. The two narratives, in the real and fantastic worlds, run in parallel and touch in subtle ways. And, like in the 1001 Nights, story begets story in both narratives. I really enjoyed it.

The reader is faced by a completely different outlook with Boualem Sansal. This former Algerian top civil servant began writing in his fities as a reaction to the civil war. Le Village de L'allemand takes in the tragedy of that event, but an extra dimension is added by another, earlier, tragedy - the Shoah. The Schiller brothers, Rachel and Malrich, were sent to live in France by their mysterious German father, a hero of the Algerian war of independence. While Rachel is a successful professional with a French wife, Malrich lives in the banlieu and is very close to being deep in with a very bad crowd. However, the civil war brings to light something of the father's past that changes completely the lives of the sons. An excellent review by Maya Jaggi can be read on the Guardian Online (spoiler alert: it gives-away some of the plot).

I started reading The Blinding Absence of Light on the train. It is a well written story about a man emprisoned in a hell-hole, together with others, for taking part in an attempted coup against Morocco's King Hassan II in 1971. The prison setting is very bleak, steeped in darkness, but the narrator is keen to tell a story, talking, in a Shahrazad kind of way, as a means of survival.

I plan to return to Naguib Mahfouz sooner rather than later. Another to-read is Boualem Sansal's Rue Darwin.

I should add here that Boualem Sansal and Tahar ben Jelloun wrote in French, and Rabih Alameddine in English. 

Jules et Jim

Today I bought Jules et Jim, and I am not talking about Truffaut's film. It's a book, and it was written by a serious French gentleman called Henri-Pierre Roché. The blurb says that Roché was in his mid-seventies when he wrote his semi-autobiographical debut novel. 

I confess to my great shame I had no idea that the first incarnation of Jules et Jim was in book form. I promise to engage (îmi iau angajamentul) in reading this book and then I will see the film again. I will also try to write something about it, if I can.

Flann O' Brien and Caragiale

Although it was only last Sunday that I mentioned him, I feel  I need to return to Flann O' Brien because the man was a comic genius. I am going through The Poor Mouth at the moment and it's been some time since I laughed out loud while reading.

Bearing the mark of great humour, the comic streak doesn't come only from the story and the language used, but also from the entire context in which the action is placed. While I am certainly not an expert in Irish matters, and without wanting to reduce the importance of very different historical, social and economical factors, I feel there is a certain spiritual affinity between the Romanians and the Irish in at least three aspects.

First of all, as someone put it after we've went through a nice meal, a glass of wine, a couple of whiskies and a long chat, it seems we're both great when it comes to dead people and commemorations. Then, we both seem to have a certain penchant for icons that constitute our national ethos and how they should be guarded. And, not least, the general reaction when somebody dares to be very honest on the issue of national ethos.

Flann O' Brien was not a man to mince his words (as can be seen in his Irish Times Cruiskeen Lawn column), and when he wrote The Poor Mouth he set out to expose some idea(l)s by pastiching them to death. And he wrote everything in the best Irish Gaelic, going so far as having paragraphs written entirely in classical 11th-13th century Irish.

In the context of late 19th - early 20th Irish literature, it appears there was a  trend of rural novels meant to highlight the real Irish (as opposed to the Anglicised, foreignised Irish) life. Reading a little on the subject, I was struck by a strange resemblance between this trend and the so-called Sămănătorist fashion that was the rage in Romania in about the same time. The name of the current comes from the literary magazine Sămănătorul - The Sower, which promoted a (semi) idyllic view of the Romanian countryside, scattered with traditional values and "real" Romanian ethos.  In both cases, the idyllic, folkloristic view made way in due time to a more realist tone that puts an emphasis on hardship.

In O' Brien's case, when he decided to write about the hard life of Gaelic peasants in the Gaeltacht by presenting the life of Bonaparte O' Coonassa, he decided to present poverty as the direst poverty that ever was as this seemed to be the true mark of a true Gael:

[Grandfather O' Coonassa says to his daughter in law who had just swept the house clean]
"When I was a raw youngster growing up, I was (as is clear to any reader of the good Gaelic books) a child among the ashes. You have thrown all the ashes of the house back into the fire or swept them out and not a bit left for the poor child on the floor to let him into. It's an unnatural and unregulated training and rearing he'll have without any experience of the ashes [...]
[My mother] took a bucket full of muck, mud and ashes and hen's droppings from the roadside and spread it around the hearth gladly in front of me. When everything was arranged, I moved over near the fire and for five hours became a child of the ashes - a raw youngster rising up according to the old Gaelic tradition. [...] the foul stench of the fireplace stayed with me for a week."

At some point, there is a Gaelic feast taking place in Corkadoracha, O' Coonassa's village, and all present are treated to fine orations:

"Gaels! he said. It delights my Gaelic heart to be here today speaking Gaelic with you at this Gaelic Feis in the Gaeltacht. May I state that I am a Gael. [...] Likewise, you are all truly Gaelic. We are all Gaelic Gaels of Gaelic lineage. [...] There is nothing in this life that is so nice and so Gaelic as truly Gaelic Gaels who speak in true Gaelic Gaelic about the truly Gaelic language [...]"

If you replace Gael and Gaelic with Romanian, you will obtain a text with the same flavour  written by the great Romanian comic writer Ion Luca Caragiale (1852-1912) about what he called "the Pure Romanians" (românii verzi):

"[...] The Statutes of the “Pure Romanians” Society
Cap. I – About the name, members, and emblem of the society
Art. 1 – It is established in Romania a Romanian society with the name of “Pure Romanians”.
Art. 2 – Anybody can be part of this society, with no discrimination of sex, age and political colour, provided they are pure Romanian men and pure Romanian women.
Art. 3 – The Emblem of the society will be a pure Romanian crushing mightily with his heel the snake of foreign-ness, which is grinding its teeth and screaming.
Cap. II – About the duties of the members of the society in general
Art. 4 – The members of any sex or age of the “Pure Romanians” society have the duty to hate everything that is foreign and everything that comes from foreigners, everything that is not pure Romanian, or everything that does not come from a pure Romanian. [...]"


The entire sketch can be read on the net on Wikisource (Romanian only).

However, exposing this kind of national harrumphing is a dangerous business, and Caragiale had long battles with those accusing him of being a bad Romanian (some adversaries attacking him for his Greek origins). In the end he decided to leave for Berlin (1905), where he died in 1912.

We should not be surprised that The Poor Mouth, "this cruelly funny assault on the fashionable Gaelic Revival of the day brought the wrath of the custodians of national sentiment upon O' Brien's head for many years thereafter" (see book description on Amazon).

Both writers have done their duty to speak out, on the model of "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear". Some did not want to hear. Some heard and didn't like the truth they were hearing.

The Periodic Table

Among the few things I know about chemistry is that the Periodic Table is a means of ordering elements in a logical manner, connecting elements and helping to make sense of this world.

Primo Levi's Periodic Table* is, like much of his work, autobiographic, and the writer associates events in his life with various elements in the periodic table, both in order to convey more meaning by the association and (so I think) to bring scientific rigour to the chaos of life.

He begins with Argon, one of the inert noble, rare gases, and says "The little I know about my ancestors presents many similarities to these gases. Not all of them were materially inert, for that was not granted them [...] But there is no doubt that they were inert in their inner spirits, inclined to disinterested speculation, witty discourses, elegant, sophisticated, and gratuitous discussion [...] Noble, inert, and rare: their history is quite poor when compared to other illustrious Jewish communities in Italy and Europe." 

Even so, with this "poor history", Levi conjures a memorable succession of Aunts and Uncles (in the larger sense of the word). One of them is Barbapartin, Uncle Bonaparte, who "had fallen from his rank as an uncle because the Lord, blessed be He, had given him so unbearable a wife that he had had himself baptized, became a monk, and left to work as a missionary in China, so as to be as far away from her as possible." This warm and funny episode intended as a presentation of his background, makes way to Hydrogen, in which Levi, as a young teenager, discovers chemistry together with a friend, blowing up a home lab in the process. This encounter with "the same element that burns in the sun and the stars" paves the way to his future career. With Zinc, the student Levi gets to muse about Fascism as a chemistry student observing reactions in the lab. With Iron, we discover a friend who introduced him to mountaineering, and with Potassium and Nickel we enter the surreal (yet too real) world of the War, and so on we go on a journey through Levi's life story through Lead, Mercury, Cerium and other elements, down to Carbon. 

Life stories, when put under the patronage of chemical elements, make more sense to Levi the chemistry specialist. By this means, life can ultimately make sense to the reader, too. 

More about Primo Levi here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primo_levi

____________

* - Voted in 2006 by The Royal Institution of Great Britain as the best science book.

Good Old (Authoritarian) Times

For no apparent reason besides having laid my eyes on it, I will dedicate this post to a patriotic book from my childhood, caled Povestiri istorice (Historic Tales), by Dumitru Almas. Please see the cover below. 

This book is part three of three books meant to popularise national history in easy to read stories accompanied by full-page illustrations. The first two books were dedicated to medieval and modern history. This third part is dedicated to the 20th Century, to new history, and I quote: "We are, then, talking about deeds, events, people, heroes of the struggle for justice and freedom, people who lived and worked in the past fifty-sixty years". (the book was published in 1984). 

The author then recalls some of the achievements of the Romanian people. Besides fighting off the Fascists, the war troubles from 1941-45 and the famine of 1946-47, he reminds the audience that the Romanian people also achieved the cooperativisation of agriculture, "and started working the land with machines: tractors, sowers, combines", built the Trans-Fagaras highway across the Carpathians ("up to 2000 metres altitude"), dug out the Danube-Black Sea channel, and "built hundreds of thousands of blocks of flats, in tens and tens of new towns".

All this was made by "millions and millions of people, among whom are your grandparents, your parents, even your older siblings. If you know this thing, if you understand it properly, you too will respect and love all that your forerunners have built and you too will be very eager and proud to follow and surpass them [...] "

"You will succeed making Romania even richer, prouder, more resplendant among the countries of the world, and more loved and respected by all peoples. Towards this goal we are directed by the Romanian Communist Party, at its forefront being Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu, the president of our country, the Romanian Socialist Republic. And you all are growing up protected and watched over by his love. He only asks of you to grow big, strong, beautiful, hard-working, serious, tenacious, daring, and loving the country and the people."

If you made it to this paragraph, you are brave people and I congratulate you. And if you resist a little bit more and analyse some key words in the text, you will see how wrong it is on so many levels. 

However, to give him his due, Dumitru Almas was a great storyteller and I remember enjoying his stories with Romanian princes fighting off the enemies (generally the Turks and Tartars), and heroes doing this and that. The introduction is more or less a set text telling the same things that appeared in countless other books and magazines, so he might not even have written it himself. The phrase "Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu, the president of our country, the Romanian Socialist Republic" was like a mantra, and it appeared everywhere as such, with no variation, like a title of nobility. 

And what did we learn from this? you will be right to ask. We learned that literature obeying diktats is generally of inferior quality, and when you strip away the propaganda it does not stand too well either. But back then, it really was entertaining.