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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.