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.

Noir from the Land of the Rising Sun

A couple of days ago I bought this new book called The Thief, by Japanese author Fuminori Nakamura. I bought it because the Kindle version of the book has a read-inside feature and I thought I should take a peek. I liked how it went, with unadorned, precise phrases talking about pickpocketing from the perspective of the thief. 

I bought it and started reading, but I have to admit that I didn't get past chapter 2 yet due to other reading commitments. I don't know how the book will progress - with the exception of what I understood from the blurb. And from the reviews. I am all in favour of reviews, positive and negative, but I think reviewers should not give away plot details in order to prove a point. because of this, I will have to fake surprise in a couple of chapters now.

And while I am on the subject of Japanese crime writing, I will mention here two other titles I've read with pleasure: The Tattoo Murder Case by Akimitsu Takagi (1948), and Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto (1961). Both of them are very good whodunnits and, as extra value, touch on life in occupied Japan (Takagi) and beat culture of 1950s-60s (Imanishi). Plus lots of information on traditional Japanese tattoos.

All three books are published by Soho Press in the US, publishers of what turned to be one of my favourite series of crime novels: Martin Limon's Sueno and Bascom Mysteries, set in 1970s South Korea. The one I liked best so far is G I Bones - I'll come back on the subject before long.

Flanning Around

Have you heard of Flann O' Brien?

Until fairly recently, neither had I. O' Brien was one of the many pen-names used by Irish wit, raconteur, writer and civil servant Brian O' Nolan, also writing as An Broc and Myles na gCopaleen. I was browsing, as one does every so often, the bookshelves in Foyles and my eye was caught by a very improbable title: At Swim Two Birds. I opened it at random and read a paragraph. Then another one. And I didn't understand where the author was coming from - the book had been published in 1939, and here I was reading a post-modern novel mixing several levels of reading, authorship and meta-authorship and recycled characters coming already formed from Irish folklore and popular literature, plus an unhealthy dose of existential ennui drowned in pints of stout in various pubs around Dublin.

The surprises come from the first page:

"A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings:

Examples of three separate openings - the first: The Pooka MacPhellimey, a member of the devil class, sat in his hut in the middle of a firwood meditating on the nature of numerals and segregating in his mind the odd ones from the even. [...]

The second opening:
There was nothing unusual in the appearance of Mr John McFurriskey but actually he had one distinction that is rarely encountered - he was born at the age of twenty-five and entered the world with memory but without a personal experience to account for it [...]

The third opening:
Finn Mac Cool was a legendary hero of old Ireland. Though not mentally robust, he was a man of superb physique and development. Each of his thighs was as thick as a horse's belly, narrowing to a calf as thick as the belly of a foal [...]

I hurt a tooth in the corner of my jaw with a lump of the crust I was eating. This recalled me to the perception of my surroundings. "

And so we continue all along the book, learning of the art of giving birth through purely aesthetic means, and about the dangers of being able to control your characters only when awake, and what unhappy characters might do to their originators. To this end, I was reminded by Raymond Queneau's Flight of Icarus where we have characters running away from the pages of the unfinished novels they are supposed to inhabit. However, I think it's rather a case of great minds thinking alike, since Queneau's book was published in 1968 and I am not sure he had access to O' Brien's work.

Having enjoyed this book greatly, I looked for other works by O' Brien, and soon found The Third Policeman, a novel about finding your heart's desire and about bicylces, and The Poor Mouth (published originally in Irish as An Béal Bocht), about seeking and finding true poverty.

I also found out that, writing as Myles na gCopaleen, Brian O' Nolan was one of the most read Irish journalists, his column Cruiskeen Lawn appearing in the Irish Times from 1940 to 1966. Let's leave Mr Tommy Tiernan give you a short reading: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT2YiDNHGyU

 More about Flann O' Brien here: www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/12/flannobrien

Ultramarine at four florins an ounce

Since it seems many things I did were related to some point to books, and keeping in mind I also like reading, I decided to start a blog about books. Books that I've read, books I'd like to read, interesting news and info from the publishing world - that kind of thing. 

Today I discovered some books from my not so distant past that I want to go through again: Michael Baxandall's Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy,   Millard Meiss' Painting in Florence and Sienna after the Black Death, Walter Friedlander's Mannerism and Mannerisms, Mosche Barasch's Theories of Art. I was delighted to discover some of the things that, for me, bring the sweetness in reading stuff that at times comes in some very stern and (dare I say it?) tedious language. Consider, for instance, the following: 

"Wednesday 3 August 1485:

at the chapel at S Spirito seventy-eight florins fifteen soldi in payment of seventy-five florins in gold, paid to Sandro Boticelli on his reckoning as follows - two florins for ultramarine, thirty-eight florins for gold and preparation of the panel, and thirty-five florins for his brush [labour and skill]". 

This agreement notice is reproduced in Baxandall, together with others concerning the likes of Ghirlandaio ("and the blue must be ultramarine of the value about four florins the ounce"), Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca. 

I am sure this is not everybody's cup of tea, but if you have a deeper interest in the history of art, I think it's impossible not to ask yourself what's the deal with the ultramarine blue: why must Ghirlandaio use stuff that's four florins an ounce, while Boticelli has only two florins to spend on it and no price per quantity is specified.

In case anyone's interested, here are some considerations about ultramarine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarine