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

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.