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.

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.

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.