1. Tell us a little bit about when and under what circumstances you left Romania.
1. I left Romania in 1981, at the age of 11. I haven’t returned until 2011, for the launch of my first novel Velvet Totalitarianism in Romanian translation, Intre Doua Lumi (Editura Curtea Veche). My father defected from the country two years before my mother and I legally immigrated to the U.S. He was a world-class mathematician and his boss was Zoia Ceausescu. She had let it be known that he wouldn’t be able to travel abroad to mathematical conferences anymore (because Nicolae Ceausescu was tightening the Iron Curtain). So he decided to take his chances, as several mathematicians had before him, and defect to the U.S. in the hopes that we would rejoin him soon. I filter aspects of our struggles to unite our family in my first novel, Intre Doua Lumi, as well as describing aspects of the adaptation to the U.S. (even though I fictionalize everything, of course, since I wrote a novel not a memoir).
2. What was your reaction when you returned to Romania, so many years later?
2. When I returned to Romania for my book launch decades later, in 2011, I was shocked and impressed to see how much the country has changed in its physical aspects, in its modernization, and in the standard of living. Of course, I only caught a privileged glimpse of Bucharest, from the perspective of an author on a book tour. So I didn’t get an inside glimpse, nor a global view of the country. It was a very brief and limited, but also very positive experience.
3. Tell us about your professional life and impression of the American academia.
3. In the academia, I taught in several departments–philosophy, art and comparative literature–since I love all of these fields. I tried to focus on the aspects of the profession that emphasize love of art, love of literature, and clarity of expression. I also found myself swimming against the currents of poststructuralism and deconstruction, at their peak in the U.S. when I was in grad. school, which I didn’t like for several reasons: 1. the writing was not clear and accessible to those who might want to understand it. 2. there was too much emphasis on the very technical “theories” and too little attention paid to the literature or art. 3. the whole field of cultural production became politicized–and I’m speaking of cultural politics–in “culture wars” that Harold Bloom and others address. Personally, I subscribe to Albert Einstein‘s wise saying: “If you can’t explain something clearly, then you don’t understand it well enough.” All in all, I’m glad to have had a solid formation in several branches of the arts and humanities in the American academia and even more glad to have left it behind and be able to write what I want, as I see fit.
4. What would you advise Romanians who might be interested in moving to the U.S.?
4. I’d advise any Romanian who is thinking about immigrating to the U.S. to visit the country for a considerable period first and find out about professional opportunities and day to day life. Just as it was easy for me to idealize Romania when I was a tourist there in 2011, it’s easy for anyone visiting the U.S. as a tourist to do the same. You never know how you’ll feel in a country until you actually live there, and find a place to work and a place to live. There are some professions, like medicine, where the degrees from one country don’t automatically get accepted in another. Many doctors from Romania have had to start from square one (medical school) or do something else related to medicine. It’s always more prudent to know exactly what you’re getting into before you make any drastic move.
5. Do you wish to visit Romania again?
5. Yes, I hope to return to Romania for the book launches of my art criticism book, Romanticism and Postromanticism, translated by the writer Dumitru Radu Popa, and for the launch of my second novel, The Seducer, which hasn’t been translated yet. During this period I hope to get to see more of the country outside of Bucharest, such as Drobeta Turnu Severin and Timisoara, where some of my family lives.
6. Is your first novel, Velvet Totalitarianism, autobiographical? If so, in what ways?
6. Velvet Totalitarianism, translated into Romanian by Mihnea Gafita under the title of Intre Doua Lumi, does incorporate some of our family’s struggles with the Romanian Securitate and the challenges of immigrating to the U.S. However, I fictionalized the entire plot, included a fictional spy thriller element (the Radu/Ioana plot line) and changed everything structurally to make the story work as a novel. Reality was only a point of departure (and research). But the novel is, after all, fiction.
7. You write books in several different domains. What leads you to do so?
7. Since I was young, I loved several fields: art, literature and philosophy. The arts are, in fact, conceptually very closely related. They’re separated only by institutions and how they’re taught. But it’s natural to look at them, and appreciate them, together, which is exactly what I do. I write about the art I appreciate, internationally, on my art blog http://fineartebooks.wordpress.com. In 2002, I founded an international art movement, called postromanticism, devoted to celebrating verisimilitude, sensuality, and beauty in art. It was intended as an alternative, not a replacement, to more abstract traditions in art. I believe in pluralism, not dogmatism, in the art world, particularly since matters of taste and definitions of art are more or less subjective. I also spend part of each week working on my new novel, Fractals of a Murder. This will be my first murder mystery, but it’s not going to be genre fiction. I still prioritize strong and realistic characterizations. Finally, I write literary reviews from time to time about books I really like. I love writing about three fields rather than just one, or just a narrow specialization of one. Although in grad school I was encouraged to pursue a more focused specialization, I wholeheartedly resisted this idea. My own ideal is of the salonnieres and philosophes of the eighteenth century, who could write and converse about all aspects of the arts and humanities, often even science. I’ve lost any hope, however, in being able to know much about science or math. My parents, Henri and Elvira Moscovici, are both mathematicians, and I saw how different (and difficult) these fields are from the humanities. The best we can hope, in the arts and humanities, is to approximate the logic, simplicity and clarity that characterizes the field of mathematics.
8. How do you see Romania’s future?
8. I see Romania’s future as being increasingly open to international collaborations and the country as being more visible internationally. Of course, success stories like Herta Muller and Cristian Mungiu add to the country’s visibility. I predict that there will be more success stories like this. In the field of journalism and literature, Romania already has collaborations with Conde Nast Publishing, Forbes Magazine and others. I think such international collaborations in journalism will expand. Culturally, in every country groups and individuals create worthy art and literature and compete for limited consecration and power. The content of the art or literature are often inseparable from the institutions competing for influence. This is part of human nature and won’t change. The politics in Romania is the wild card. I don’t know enough about the ins and outs of politics in the country to make any predictions about it. It would be best for the country and its people, needless to say, if the infrastructure and laws of a democratic nation are taken seriously.
How writers write fiction: Marching to the beat of your own drum
by Claudia Moscovici
In an earlier article, entitled Why writers write, I explored some of the reasons why writers write fiction by looking into common misconceptions. I argued, for instance, that most writers don’t write in order to achieve fame or fortune, both of which are cosmically unlikely and therefore equally unlikely to last as primary motivations for writers past a very young (and naïve) age:
Now I’d like to explore the process of writing (and misconceptions about it as well), by relying on my own experience as a novelist as well as by using as examples a few of my favorite fiction writers. Basically, I believe that there’s no rule, regimen or standard way of writing fiction: not only in terms of content and style (the diversity of fiction speaks for itself and renders this point quite obvious), but also in terms of the writing process itself.
The diversity in styles and approaches to fiction writing makes the job of those who teach Creative Writing un-enviably difficult. I’ve often read interviews with fiction writers and advice given writers offered by Creative Writing seminars, courses and websites that indicate certain standard procedures of writing fiction. Those usually include making a plot outline; writing a scheme for the structure of the short story or novel; disciplining and pacing yourself as a creative writer in specific ways. Some teachers, writers and courses even suggest that fiction writers need to isolate themselves from social media, email and other external “distractions” in order to concentrate better on writing fiction. Don’t get me wrong, I think such advice can be very helpful to many writers. Yet, at the same time, I still maintain that the creative writing process is as individual as writing styles. Each writer writes at his or her own pace and requires specific conditions.
There’s no doubt that all fiction writers need some uninterrupted periods of time to write fiction and a good place to do it, or A Room of One’s Own (1929), to allude to Virginia Woolf’s famous essay. The reason for this is quite obvious: fiction writing requires stepping into imaginary situations and entering the minds of imagined characters. This delicate creative process would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in short spurts of time or with constant interruptions. Speaking from personal experience, this is part of the reason why my first novel, Velvet Totalitarianism (2009), which I wrote when I was an academic teaching philosophy and literature and a young mom of two small kids, took me ten years to write. Once my children became older and more independent and (especially) once I became a full-time writer and art critic, I had the right conditions to finish The Seducer (2011), my second novel, in only three years. But I wouldn’t take this common denominator of fiction writers—needing some uninterrupted chunks of time, a space to write and periods of peace and quiet—to an extreme, to suggest that fiction writers need to isolate themselves from social media or external input in order to write fiction. There’s a delicate balance between needing external input and isolating oneself to write fiction (or to create art, a similar creative process). Nobody can dictate to any writer or artist what that balance is because it’s as individual as the personality of each writer and his or her writing style.
In fact, probably many creative writers and artists find themselves in the position that Pablo Picasso describes to his partner, Françoise Gilot: namely, that of needing external stimulation and contact with others as a rich source of inspiration for art, yet also, because of that, not having enough time to focus on each work of art. As Gilot recalls in her autobiography, Life with Picasso:
“Sometimes Pablo would begin a canvas in the morning and in the evening he would say, ‘Oh, well, it’s done, I suppose. What I had to say plastically is there, but it came almost too quickly. If I leave it like that, with only the appearance of having what I wanted to put into it, it doesn’t satisfy me. But I’m interrupted continually every day and I’m hardly ever in a position to push my thought right up to its last implication.’ […] I asked him why he didn’t shut out the world, and with it the interruptions. ‘But I can’t,’ he said. ‘What I create in painting is what comes from my interior world. But at the same time I need the contacts and exchanges I have with others.’” (Life with Picasso, Françoise Gilot, Anchor Books, New York, 1989, p. 123)
In our times, this balance between external contacts and inspiration and the solitude necessary to perfect any art form is probably even more difficult to reach because we live in an era of inundation from social media on a daily basis. Nowadays, fiction writers and artists rely upon the social media—Facebook, blogs, interviews with journalists–not only to speak about their art and share with readers (or viewers) what they’ve already produced, but also to find new sources of inspiration. For some fiction writers–particularly those who write historical fiction, true crime novels and psychological– research and external input may be indispensable. Once again speaking from my own experience, when I wrote the historical novel Velvet Totalitarianism (Intre Doua Lumi), I had to read literally dozens of books on the history of Romania and about Romanian communism in order to be able to draw a historically accurate fictional depiction of that era. I couldn’t rely simply on inspiration or on fading childhood memories, since I had left the country at a relatively young age and wanted my novel to be partly based on actual facts, not only about invented characters and situations. When I wrote my second novel, The Seducer, on the subject of psychopathic seduction, I became even more dependent on external sources of information. I relied especially on blogs, since at the time there were relatively few books published on the subject of psychopaths and other social predators. Most of the information on the subject, particularly testimonials by victims which were extremely helpful, could be found on blogs such as lovefraud.com, which I read with great interest as background for writing fiction about a psychopathic seducer.
I believe that how you write—the process of fiction writing itself, starting from the space you right in; how fast or slow you pace yourself; the conditions and interruptions you choose or that are imposed upon you—does NOT determine the QUALITY of your fiction. But these conditions, and the balance you find as a fiction writer between isolation and external input—has a significant impact upon the QUANTITY and even the style of your fiction. The best advice I can offer any fiction writer is to find his or her own balance that works for them rather than rely upon generic advice. I guess that’s a paradoxical way of saying the best advice I have is not to follow any general advice and choose instead what works for your situation, personality and style. To support my case for the importance of marching to the beat of your own drum, I’d like to offer examples from some of my favorite writers.
1. Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and La Comédie humaine
As a scholar of Comparative Literature specializing in 19th-century French fiction, it’s not surprising that my main examples will come mostly from the French classics. One of my favorite novelists, Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), rivaled Napoleon in his ambition. In his wide-ranging work, La Comédie humaine, Balzac aimed to paint a literary portrait of “all aspects of society” during the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy (1815-1848). He wrote about 91 finished stories, novels and essays that capture almost every facet of French society and culture following the fall of Napoleon in 1815. Like many writers, his creative genius was spurred on by failure. After finishing school, Balzac apprenticed to become a lawyer, but decided pretty early on that he didn’t like the field. He then experimented with publishing, printing, becoming a critic and even a politician. All of these more traditional professions didn’t suit him, however.
Ultimately, Balzac decided to follow his dream of being a fiction writer. Given the scope of his literary ambition, he set for himself an extremely rigorous routine. He wrote at all hours of the day and night, staying awake by drinking many cups of strong coffee that ultimately damaged his health. Throughout his life, Balzac’s difficult writing schedule—and lack of financial stability—strained his relationship with his family and even with friends. Despite writing dozens of novels and short stories, Balzac didn’t write quickly. He just worked long hours. Biographers document that he wrote approximately 15 hours a day. He took a nap after supper from 6 p.m to midnight, then woke up to write during the evening and night again. The author’s novels are greatly influenced by his life experiences, even though they’re not exactly autobiographical. Like Zola did after him, Balzac uses his observations of society to create fictional characters that offer a sweeping sketch of his era. His writing is a reflection of the balance he found between living and interacting with so many people from very diverse social backgrounds and the strenuous discipline he imposed on himself in order to fulfill his vast literary ambition.
2. Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) and Madame Bovary (1856)
Of course, writing a little may take just as much discipline and time as writing a lot. At the other end of the spectrum (at least in terms of quantity of writing), my favorite French writer, Gustave Flaubert, was far less prolific than Balzac, even though he was equally ambitious. Flaubert achieved international fame for his unforgettable novel, Madame Bovary (1856), as well as for a beautiful, innovative yet starkly honest (and even cynical) mode of writing that the author polished to perfection. For Flaubert, style was everything. Avoiding all clichés, he edited fastidiously his short stories and novels, pursuing what he called “le mot juste” (the right word). Perfecting style in a few works took as much work for Flaubert as sketching an entire era in nearly 100 works did for Balzac. In his correspondence, Flaubert states that this perfected style didn’t flow naturally out of him. He had to work hard, and edit constantly, to approximate it.
Like many writers, Flaubert encountered his share of challenges and setbacks. By the time of his death, however, he became known as the master of French realism (despite his lyrical style, which is also regarded by critics as the last echo of Romanticism). The publication of Madame Bovary (1856), the story of the disillusionment and eventual suicide of a provincial doctor’s wife who (fruitlessly) seeks love and meaning through a series of adulterous affairs, was greeted by the public with scandal rather than admiration. When chapters of the novel were published in La Revue de Paris (October 1956 to December 1956), Madame Bovary was attacked as “obscene” by the public prosecutor. Flaubert became acquitted, however, the following year. Afterwards, the novel quickly became a best seller, going far beyond a succès de scandale. By the time of his death, Flaubert was considered as one of the greatest French writers of the century (and he still is).
No rule, advice or measure could apply equally well to a writer like Balzac as to a writer like Flaubert, except perhaps the very general tenet that each found his own balance and discipline in the process of writing to suit his writing style, personality and literary ambition.
3. Snippets of the interview with Romanian writer Razvan Petrescu: Marching to the Beat of your own Drum
Perhaps no writer shows the relativity of the writing process—and even casts doubt upon the boundary conventionally drawn between fiction and nonfiction, or fact and imagination—as my friend, the Romanian writer Razvan Petrescu. I have already written about his latest collection of short stories in the following article:
To continue our discussion, I recently interviewed him about his books, his life and the writing process for a series of articles published in the Romanian magazine Scrisul Romanesc and the blog Agentia de Carte. To my mind, Razvan Petrescu exemplifies the meaning of the English expression “marching to the beat of your own drum,” both as a person and as a writer (since the two aspects are, after all, intertwined). What struck me most about his interview, from which I’m translating only a few bits and pieces here, is the fact that his nonfiction (meaning his answers to my very traditional, journalistic questions) reads like some of the best fiction I have ever read. His first answer, to my very standard question “When did you begin writing fiction?” reminds me of lines from one of my favorite novels, Lolita (1955), by the man I consider the greatest American novelist, the Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov. In this beautiful and lyrical passage of the novel, the narrator, Humbert Humbert introduces Annabel, his first love and the precursor to Lolita: “All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because the frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each others soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do” (Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, New York: Vintage International, 1997, p. 12).
Although Petrescu has a style of his own, of course, like Nabokov, he’s a master of style, whether he writes fiction or nonfiction. Speaking of which, if you believe that any course, author or teacher can draw a sharp distinction between fiction and nonfiction or tell any creative writer how to write, you may change your mind after reading parts of this humorous, honest, chaotic and–above all—unique and original interview with the writer and editor Razvan Petrescu. Enjoy the (non)fiction!
Claudia Moscovici: When did you begin writing fiction?
Razvan Petrescu: Around the age of 15, when I fell in love for the third time. She had long, wavy red hair and well-formed breasts. My wonder knew no bounds when I was faced with this enigmatic pyramidal structure. I was fascinated by other zones and became absent-minded. Which didn’t provoke any particular happiness, given the fact that I was still expected to do various practical things, which included painting the walls, as I was dreaming with my hand shielding my forehead. I was thus overcome by a terrible love. It was autumn, the leaves were falling, the baby birds were hatching, while I was meandering in front of her house in my high school uniform with the number of my school inscribed on my left arm, my face turning melancholic-green with despair. She wasn’t in love with me yet. She would become swept in the feeling only at the moment when it left me and, because I had already read a whole slew of books (especially police thrillers and stories about submarines), I started writing her verses with an eye makeup pencil on a little notepad. I would read them alone at home and would cry seeing how much pain those words stolen from maximum suffering could provoke. When I read them again three years later, I couldn’t believe that I was able to write such idiocies and was overcome with a boundless sense of shame.
CM: What inspires you to write fiction?
RP: Almost anything. The blade of grass upon which climbs a little insect. The insect falls over, moves its little legs, I step on it with my shoe, a shoe meant for such events. The purplish clouds crossed by planes at sunset on the Paris-Slobozia route awaken in me aviatico-poetic catastrophes. I see the terrified passengers placing on their oxygen masks, screaming in them, waving their arms. The oxygen doesn’t work, the airplane changes course at the last moment exactly above IOR Park, over a little pond upon which floats a little ship with a hole in it. They all die of asphyxiation on the plane, while those on the ship drown in the greenish waters. … Usually I transform banal events with regular people into tragedies, or vice versa. I’m attracted to the dramatic, the grotesque, the painful. I describe what I observe, adding as many imagined things as possible to make the story more plausible, or conversely, more absurd.
CM: Who are the writers that inspire you most?
RP: Bach, Chekhov, Céline, Salinger, John Osborne, Raymond Carver, Mozart, Miles Davis, Donald Bartholomew, Joyce, Faulkner, Schubert, Mahler, Lester Young, Cortazar, Buzzati, Garcia Marquez, Truman Capote, Coleman Hawkins, Chopin, Ben Webster, Oscar Peterson, Haneke, Pachelbel, Fellini, Tarkovsky, Beethoven. The harmony of the piano. The king of the flies. Friday or the languages of the Pacific. … In order not to become mixed up, I’ve gotten into the habit of including my answer to this same question, which I’ve been asked by others and asked myself in other contexts, adding to it nonsensically titles, names, kinds, in order to leave an impression of culture pure and simple. But, above all, I do this in order to avoid boredom…
CM: No fiction is strictly autobiographical, but did you express any personal elements in your fiction. If so, which ones?
RP: I didn’t express anything, for the simple reason that everything I write and experience is fiction. In other words, if I included autobiographical elements in my fiction, they’re fictional. Example: the fact that I studied medicine. I didn’t. I wasn’t a doctor. I never lived in Bucharest. I didn’t go to high school number 43. I didn’t try to sleep with the high school beauty queen in ninth grade. I didn’t have a friend in kindergarten that died, and I didn’t go to her funeral. … I wasn’t a writer, I didn’t have a job, and thus I didn’t work at the magazines “The Word,” “Amphitheater,” the “Literature Museum,” the “Ministry of Culture,” All Publishing, Rosetti, Brukenthal and Curtea Veche Publishing….
CM: To follow-up my last question, what is the relation between your personal life and your life as a writer?
RP: It’s one of total harmony. They overlap. Any object or being that overlaps with another is happy. Given that I don’t need a job in order to make a living, I write all the time, especially at night. I’ve dedicated my life to literature for well over two decades. My personal life has been fulfilled in being a writer and vice versa. I had the good fortune of receiving good money by selling books and, also, through translations. Last month, when I signed a contract for the translation of my most recent book in Macedonia, they offered me almost 150 Euros. I had to renounce the retribution, since I know my value and it’s not quite so big. If I had accepted the payment for the author’s rights I’d have lost it completely, so I asked the editor to allow me to give him money.
Razvan Petrescu’s Rubato: The Coordinates of World-class Romanian Fiction
by Claudia Moscovici
Despite charting very unfamiliar territories in fiction, the writer Razvan Petrescu is quite familiar—and famous—in his native country, Romania. A versatile and award-winning author, Petrescu is an essayist, fiction writer and playwright. Among his numerous literary prizes, he won the award Book of the Year at the National Salon of Books in Cluj; a fiction award for The Farce (Farsa, Editura Unitext, 1994) from the Association of Writers in Bucharest (Asociatia Scriitorilor din Bucuresti); the award UNITER for the best play of the year, Spring at the Buffet (Primavara la buffet, Editura Expansion, 1995), and the Prose Prize given by Radio Romania Cultural. Some of his works have been translated into Hebrew, Spanish and will be soon translated into English as well.
Traddutore Traditore
I have to admit, however, that I don’t envy the translators’ job, which I’m sure is very challenging. They say that poetry is the most difficult genre to translate, but in my opinion fiction that is unique in content and employs stylistically many dialects—such as the writing of Ion Luca Caragiale, Romain Gary and Razvan Petrescu–is the most difficult kind of literature to translate. And yet, that is usually also the most noteworthy and ingenious fiction. My main goal in this review is to convey the fact that Razvan Petrescu is a world-class author to an international audience, which may not be familiar with the Romanian language or with Romanian literature. How will I go about doing that? In mathematics or geography, you pinpoint a location, however remote or difficult to find, in terms of known coordinates. There’s no equivalent precise guide in the arts and humanities, however. The best I can do to offer such coordinates is to explain the relatively unfamiliar in terms of the relatively familiar: canonized authors that everyone knows; psychological fiction; universal themes and philosophical currents. The book I’ll be discussing here is Rubato (Curtea Veche Publishing, 2011), which is a collection of several of Razvan Petrescu’s prize-winning short fiction, published from 1989 to 2003. Rubato is like an album of the author’s best hits, if you will, but it is also far more than that: it’s world-class fiction, comparable, I believe, to the works of legendary writers like Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges.
Unique, uncategorizable fiction
Most fiction writers can be integrated rather easily into a genre, a movement or a style: be it realism, fantasy, horror, or magical realism. There are a few writers, however, who are so quirky in style and unique in content that they’re almost impossible to categorize in terms of any neat and familiar literary labels. Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges are two of my favorite authors among those. How do you attach a label to Kafka’s psychological realism of the subconscious and dream; to what do you compare Borges’ mathematical paradoxes translated into a puzzling fiction? I think Razvan Petrescu’s Rubato fits into this uncategorizable category of fiction. Which is why I believe that the best way to describe it to those who haven’t read it yet is in terms of equally innovative and quirky authors, such as Kafka and Borges. What Rubato shares with, for instance, Kafka’s The Castle (1926) is a psychological realism that goes far beyond—and beneath—the layers of our conscious reality.
photo Herb Ritts
The psychological realism of the subconscious
If Kafka’s The Castle (1926) or The Trial (1925) feel so real to us it’s not because they are actually realist in either content or style. It’s because these works focus so well on our unconscious fears—of powerlessness and alienation in a modern, bureaucratic society—that they bring them to the surface of our awareness. In reading the works of Kafka, we face our misgivings and fears, confront them and even laugh at them, since they appear absurd. Yet we no longer minimize them and are unable to shove them back under the rug, into the unconscious, to dismiss them. That’s why the works of Kafka remain so eerie and unsettling to us. Despite their sense of the absurd and humor, they’re as far removed as possible from superficial farce. The same phenomenon is at work when you read Razvan Petrescu’s Rubato. This slice of life tale depicts a psychiatrist’s “normal” day at work, which is full of abnormalities.
photo Vadim Stein
All sorts of patients come in and out of his office, including a security officer/spy, a prostitute suffering from venereal diseases and a woman with psychopathic tendencies, who likes to torture and kill birds. Though they are all quite severely disturbed, the readers can’t help but laugh when reading their plights. The security officer has stinky feet and a very shallow conscience; the prostitute takes her clothes off and asks the psychiatrist to cure her venereal diseases; while the sadistic woman that likes to torture birds is beat at her own game (cruelty), as the psychiatrist admits to being more weird than her (and better at “befriending” and then killing birds as well). The name of the game for each of the characters is a complete detachment from the elements that render us human (empathy, caring, emotion, deep and meaningful connections to others). Despite this serious psychological deficiency, the tone of the narrative is so realistic in its style—the dialect and mannerisms of speech of each character constitute in themselves masterpieces of modern fiction—that the reader too becomes somewhat detached and laughs at them. Yet in laughing at them we also laugh at ourselves. Razvan Petrescu captures the most disturbing elements of the human condition through a series of hallucinatory characters, dialogues and diatribes that simultaneously appear absurd and implausible yet also seem more real than our daily, conscious reality. How does he do that? Through what may be called “laughter through tears,” that authors like Ion Luca Caragiale, Anton Chekhov and Shalom Aleichem are best known for.
Laughter through tears: Neither satire nor irony
The kind of narrative that establishes layers of psychological distance among the narrator, characters and readers in literature is usually described as “satire” or “irony”. But like Anton Chekkov, Ion Luca Caragiale or Shalom Aleichem’s fiction, Rubato provides neither: or rather, it offers much more than that. Irony and satire are rhetorical stances that assume a position of superiority towards the characters and their actions from the narrator and/or author and readers. Authors that rely heavily on irony often ridicule the characters’ weaknesses and follies. I see no evidence of any narrative sense of superiority or authorial arrogance in Rubato. When we laugh at its characters, we realize we’re also laughing at ourselves. Hence the sense of unease that accompanies Rubato’s keen and pervasive sense of humor, which brings to light our phobias, perverse desires, abnormality and insecurities.
Even more disturbingly, Rubato constantly reminds us of the fragility of human life and of our mortality. Scenes of death and decay pervade Razvan Petrescu’s fiction. No matter how theatrical and comical the depictions of illness and death may be, unlike the scenes we see on the daily news, they still touch and disturb us psychologically. With a sense of indulgence and even love for humanity—and placing himself on the same plane as his characters and readers–the author opens up, like a doctor, the worst of our human qualities and examines them closely, one by one. We greet this complex process with mixed emotions–laughter, horror, revulsion and indulgence–because in these narratives, like in a hallway of mirrors, we see reflections of our inner lives.
photo Herb Ritts
Love, misogyny and women
In a recent interview with Esquire Magazine (Romania), Razvan Petrescu described himself—tongue-in-cheek, of course–as a “misogynist womanizer.” I’ve never in my life met a misogynist who admits to hating yet needing women. Misogynists tend to hide their contempt for women under the pretext of loving them (a technique common for psychopathic seducers) or of respecting certain women (such as mothers or the “virtuous” few) and hating all the rest. There’s no trace of such underlying misogyny in any of Petrescu’s works. What we find in Rubato, for instance, is a compelling depiction of fear of the object of desire. This fear is a far cry from Arthur Schopenhauer or Henry de Montherlant’s flagrant and self-righteous misogyny. Many gorgeous, sexy women populate Petrescu’s fiction. Their erotic power is attenuated by humor; their emotional appeal is neutralized by fear.
In the short story The Door (Usa), for instance, a mother and a daughter exchange worried whispers about their husband/father, who is dying on a hospital bed in an adjacent room. The doctor, about to go to a surgery and utterly indifferent to his patient’s plight, attempts to persuade the two women to take the moribund patient back home. There’s nothing he can do for him at the hospital anymore. Rather than worrying about the poor state of health of the patient, the two women debate in hushed voices the cost of transporting the ill man home. The patient overhears the whole conversation through a slightly cracked door. He expires, in a scene as vivid but more concise than Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886), knowing that he’s neither appreciated nor loved by his wife and his daughter. Razvan Petrescu’s fictional world is filled with such uncaring women, indifferent doctors, loveless marriages and spoiled children. They show the following thought experiment in action: When cynicism is pushed as far as it can go, it becomes psychological realism.
Cynicism versus nihilism
There’s no doubt that Razvan Petrescu’s fiction is pervaded by an underlying sense of cynicism. Not nihilism, but cynicism. Nihilism, or the questioning and negation of human ideals and values, may be great for philosophy—think Nietzsche—but it can be awfully boring and preachy when we encounter it in fiction. Who needs a dissertation on the meaninglessness of life and human values from some uppity character delivering lectures from up high, on a pedestal? Cynicism, on the other hand, tends to be a very welcome perspective in fiction. It avoids both the unforgivable naiveté of idealism and the arrogance of nihilism. Of course, in modern usage, cynicism has little to do with the original Greek Cynics, who believed that the purpose of life was to live a virtuous and modest life, deprived of unnecessary luxuries: in other words, a life in accordance to Nature. Perhaps modern Cynicism uses as its frame of reference only the most comical and extreme of the Cynics—Diogenes of Sinope—who rejected his society, begged to survive, and lived in a stone jar in the marketplace. Either way you look at it, cynicism offers a critical perspective of the human condition and of our societies with enough humor and sense of the absurd that even humanists can take it. Written in a dramatic, hallucinatory and utterly engaging polyphony of dialects (and characterizations); confronting our deepest fears and flaws with a disarming honesty and contagious cynicism; probing psychologically the limits of our humanity and moral values, Razvan Petrescu’s Rubato is a masterpiece of world (not just Romanian) literature.
Were you disappointed by the ending to the series Lost? What follows is a story with as intricate a mythology as Lost’s but with an important difference: in the end it is all explained mechanistically, without resort to mysticism or religion. At the conclusion of the novel, the following summary of the core mystery, taken from the opening chapter, will be perfectly sensible: The Oopsah told a story, a majestic, exalted, beatific story of the coming of the end times and the rise of the Controller.
He learned how the world would end, who would destroy it, and how he, Zranga, could prevent it. He learned that he had been appointed by destiny – by the Controller himself – to carry out this mission. But above all he learned of the existence of a perfect being, the demigod Celeste, trapped beyond time in a cycle of eternal death. Only Zranga could rescue her, and to do this he had to place a giant door on the bottom of the Silent Sea, and kill the Great Man. Read on to found out how far Ivy Morven will go to stop Tobor Zranga from realizing his destiny, and how this alternative universe is bizarrely structured so that the most rational acts are the most extreme.
The Cube is well-written, ingeniously crafted and has great character development. Although clearly a science fiction narrative, The Cube also transcends its genre, to attract a broad audience. It tells the Romeo and Juliet story of a young couple from adjacent sides of a cubic planet who meet at an edge and develop a relationship in the midst of a war that threatens to destroy the planet. The story is unique in creating an alternative universe from first principles: all matter is oriented in one of the six Euclidian directions.
This simple deviation from our own universe leads to the creation of cubic celestial bodies and allows a reimagination of transportation, power generation, warfare, architecture, and lovemaking, among other things. As an example, the political conflict leading to war is that both inhabited sides of the planet generate hydroelectric power by draining a large body of water on one side through edge sluices, a cheap and easy source of energy that will ultimately destroy the planet if the water is drained too far.
What drives this story is the relationship of the two main characters, a girl escaping from a classified weapons facility with terrible secrets she refuses to share, and a rural boy who literally catches her when she leaps over the edge and soon learns he is the target of international espionage. The novel is organized around a series of revelations of the girl’s secrets culminating with an answer to the ultimate question – who is Celeste?
As you can probably tell even from my brief description, The Cube is a multidimensional narrative (pun intended!) that could simultaneously described as a science fiction novel as well as a moving love story and a dystopic utopia fiction, similar to George Orwell’s 1984. You can discover this alternative universe, governed by different laws of physics but similar political motivations and machinations for power as in our world, on the links below:
Virginia Costeschi: You are a complex writer; you have nonfiction books, a poem volume, and novels. You teach, you started the postromanticism movement. How do you manage this creative diversity?
Claudia Moscovici: If judged by scholarly standards of specialization, I’m seen as having wide-ranging and diverse interests: in art, poetry, philosophy and literature, exactly as you state. My daughter, however, who plans to study chemistry in college, tells me my interests are very narrow. All of them fall under “arts and humanities” (as opposed to mathematics, science, or business for example, fields about which I know very little). I think both perspectives are correct. My daughter is right because the arts and humanities are separated only artificially. Art, history and literature have so much to do with one another and are actually very close. Yet it’s also true that the domains became very specialized during the 20th century, so my interests are diverse, from this perspective. Personally, I much prefer the Enlightenment model, of the philosophes and the salonnieres, where the various branches of arts and letters are seen as inseparable. Because in my eyes, they still are.
V.C.: What is postromanticism about and why did you initiate it?
C.M.: Postromanticism is, as we call it, “the art of passion.” It’s the aesthetic movement that values sensuality, beauty and passion in contemporary art, which I started in 2002 with the Mexican sculptor Leonardo Pereznieto. Since then, dozens of very well-regarded international artists have joined this art movement. We hope to bring it to my native Romania, when my book about it, Romanticism and Postromanticism, which has been translated by the writer and critic D. R. Popa, will be launched by Editura Curtea Veche. My main motivation for launching this art movement was a positive one. I wanted to highlight what I saw as very positive aesthetic values in contemporary art. However, I was also motivated by a critical spirit. I thought that art today that is inspired by the Romantic and Realist movements was systematically excluded from museums of contemporary art and insufficiently reviewed by reputable art critics. I wanted to put my training in philosophy (aesthetics) and art to use in correcting, as much as I could, this glaring omission.
V.C.: Which internal resorts determined you to choose literature and writing?
C.M.: My main motivation in becoming a writer was the fact that I adored reading literature. My favorites were the great nineteenth century French writers, such as Tolstoy and Flaubert. I also admired the marvels an immigrant writer—Nabokov—could do with the English language. I think their tradition of writing, more or less realist in style and with incredibly rich characterizations, continues today in writers of mainstream “literary fiction” such as Jeffrey Eugenides, Wally Lamb and Jonathan Franzen. I couldn’t resist the internal drive to turn my love of reading into a love of writing, particularly about the historical and psychological themes that obsess me most.
V.C.: Why did you write Velvet Totalitarianism?
C.M.: Jeffrey Eugenides wrote a comic epic about Greek immigrants in Middlesex. I wanted to write such an epic about Romania and Romanian immigrants in Velvet Totalitarianism/Intre Doua Lumi. Communism was, of course, a very dark period in Romanian history. Yet even during this very difficult period people loved, laughed and smiled. I wanted to capture both the darkness and oppression and the lighter aspects of the communist era. Velvet Totalitarianism/Intre Doua Lumi shows several facets of the totalitarian experience: the love of family and romantic entanglements; the secret police (Securitate), spying and political oppression, as well as the sometimes comical challenges of being an immigrant. Besides, comedy is not always lighter than tragedy. It can be, as it is for Caragiale or Shalom Aleichem, “laughter through tears.”
V.C.: How did you choose the characters in Velvet Totalitarianism?
C.M.: In a sense they chose me by being on my mind for a long time. Leaving my country and family was something we needed to do for political reasons. But it was very difficult emotionally. I loved my country and my family and was well-integrated with my friends and teachers at school. Fundamentally, I felt Romanian in upbringing and culture, which I still consider myself today despite the fact I have some difficulty speaking and writing the language. When I left Romania at the age of 11, I told myself that even if I couldn’t see most of my family and my country—for who knows how many years–I would one day write about them. Velvet Totalitarianism/Intre Doua Lumi represents my effort to preserve the past and keep it alive, through fiction, for both myself and others.
V.C.: Irina, the girl that leaves Romania for United States seems an alter ego of the author in Velvet Totalitarianism. Is it right?
C.M.: Yes, many aspects of Irina are autobiographical. However, many are not. To write about some of the historical and political aspects of Romanian communism, as well as the spy plot, I had to read a lot of books on the subject, and create fictional characters that brought those aspects to life. So a lot of Velvet Totalitarianism/Intre Doua Lumi is based on real life, yet at the same time everything is altered and fictionalized, to fit harmoniously into the novel (as fiction).
V.C.: How was your meeting with a totally different society, customs, social rules, life style?
C.M.: It was a culture shock. Because I’m an emotional person and a nostalgic by nature, immigrating to the United States and leaving most of my family and all of my friends in Romania was very difficult. I also didn’t speak English, so I had to learn it very quickly if my goal was to get good grades and go to a good university (which I definitely wanted to). But ultimately my adaptation was a survival mode, and in a way, superficial. I still feel mostly Romanian culturally. If you look at my Facebook friends, about 90 percent or so are of Romanian origin. And even though I hadn’t seen my native country for 30 years, when I came for the launch of Intre Doua Lumi in the fall of 2011, I felt completely at home (only Bucharest was so much more modernized and beautiful, of course, than it was when I left the country). I think that human beings adapt to new cultures to survive and accomplish their goals in life. But it doesn’t change much who we really are, on the inside. Inside, I’m Romanian more so than American.
V.C.: Velvet Totalitarianism seems a very difficult book to write, I guess. You have alternate temporal planes, many characters (some of them very complex and profound), love stories, traitors, a dictatorship and a very vivid description of the communist Romania.
C.M.: Yes, you’re right, Velvet Totalitarianism/Intre Doua Lumi was difficult to write for several reasons. First of all, I didn’t have enough time. It took me ten years to finally finish this novel because I was a full-time academic and a mom, which left me very little free time for writing fiction. Second, I had to integrate a lot of historical and political information about the Ceausescu era, the Securitate, the CIA, the Romanian orphanages and the revolution of 1989, but in a way that reads like fiction rather than like a political science or history textbook. The fictional characters couldn’t be illustrations or mouth-pieces of history, they had to come to life in their own right. The biggest challenge was tying the two parts of the plot—the spy thriller/love story between Radu and Ioana and the Irina and Paul love story—together. The novel includes two separate plot-lines in it. In a movie, the director would probably need to choose one or the other. But in the novel they were tied together.
V.C.: The characters in the book have any correspondent in reality? Did you use real life stories to describe the so-called procedure of leaving the country, a dissident’s life or Romanian Security Service?
C.M. Almost every aspect of the novel is inspired either by my family’s experiences in communist Romania or by historical research. However, I fictionalized all of it. Velvet Totalitarianism/Intre Doua Lumi is not really historical fiction. It’s more a family epic, a love story, a thriller, all rolled into one novel.
V. C.: How did you see the last two decades of Romania? Before 1989, there was a cultural résistance, how does it look now?
C. M.: Some cultural resistance existed in Romania before 1989, but it was little compared to countries like Poland. I think the internal dissidents gained a lot of momentum from the other anti-communist revolutions which preceded the one in Romania. This doesn’t take anything away from their courage. The time was ripe, politically, for the revolution.
V.C.: You also have a prolific online activity. Please give us some details about all your blogs – Literaturesalon, Postromanticism, and Psychopathyawareness.
C.M.: Blogs offer one of the best and most immediate ways for an author to communicate with readers. If you want the communication to be both ways, you have a comments section. If that turns out to be too time-consuming, you just post articles. There’s so much flexibility in blogs. It’s also a system of writing which is very democratic, in that it isn’t based on what professional connections you have. Anyone can write and can build a readership based on the relevance and effectiveness of his or her writing. I love this democratic nature of blogging and the freedom it gives writers.
V. C.: How do you see the Romanian national book market?
C. M.: Although I’m Romanian culturally, I’m also Americanized. So I see the Romanian book market through American eyes. I love the fact that there are so many thriving book review blogs, such as BookMag. To me, that’s the direction of books, internationally. I love the fact the major Romanian publishers are also publishing ebooks, which is going to happen more and more, also internationally. I was very impressed by the fact that the publisher of Intre Doua Lumi, Editura Curtea Veche, was extremely progressive in terms of a multimedia campaign, with a book trailer by Claudiu Ciprian Popa and a music video trailer by Andy Platon. For the next book launch, of postromanticism, I’d love to integrate dance. Book launches, to my mind, should be celebrations: a form of artistic entertainment that doesn’t take away from intellectual content, but enhances it. On the negative side, I was disappointed to find out that The New York Review of Books left Romania after only a few years. Culture is international, no matter how much you respect the individuality and traditions of your own country. Reputable international collaborations, such as with Hachette Publishing Group, Conde Nast (and others) are very valuable in Romania. They’re a big asset to the country. Once lost, it’s more difficult to bring them back. I’d love to see more, rather than less, of such cultural collaborations: something like The Huffington Post Romania (as there already is Le Huffington Post in France) and Oprah’s Book Club in Romania. If there’s any way I can help make such cultural collaborations possible, you can count me in.
V.C.: Please tell us about The Seducer, your latest literary work and when it will be translated in Romania.
C.M.: The Seducer takes the structure and plot line of one of my favorite classic novels, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and makes it contemporary by changing Vronsky’s psychological profile to that of a psychopathic seducer: a social and sexual predator, in other words. I think in reality very often serial seducers are extremely dangerous men (usually men, but they can be female, as in the case of “black widows”). For such individuals seduction isn’t about love, or even about sex in itself. It’s a hunt; a game. The women they seduce, trap and hurt are their prey. Such dangerous seducers initially disguise themselves as madly in love; as caring, wonderful people. They wear “a mask of sanity,” as it’s called in psychology. Psychopaths are not insane, just calculated, cold and evil. They lack empathy and a conscience. Research shows that this deficiency is mostly neurological, not based on their upbringing. What they want from their prey differs, but the common denominator is power. Psychopaths are driven by a desire to possess and control others: be it an entire nation as for Stalin, or a few women, as in my new novel, The Seducer. I just gave a copy of The Seducer to Editura Curtea Veche this week. I don’t know when or if it will be translated into Romanian, but hope that it will be, since I believe this theme will resonate a lot with Romanian readers. I don’t think there are many women who haven’t been burned by psychopaths at some point in their lives. Usually they don’t know what burned them, however. This novel will reveal aspects of their own lives in a classic literary structure, inspired by Tolstoy. This theme and novel are all the more relevant now that Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is being made into a movie, starring Keira Knightley.
V.C.: We have a national reading campaign, and we would like to have your message for Romanian students about reading, literature and their contribution to one’s success in life.
C.M.: I’d like to say to Romanian students that reading—literature and the arts in general—stimulates their imagination in a way that few other activities ever will. All of the media that entertains them–youtube, TV, movies, videogames—will never rival books in engaging their imagination. The more realist the media—such as movies—the less work our own minds do to process the information; to interpret it. In reading books we not only learn about the subjects they depict, we help create them. We imagine them with our mind’s eyes. In being readers, we are therefore also co-writers in some way. And that experience is unique, valuable and timeless, no matter how much the future of publishing will change.
In my career as a writer–of both fiction and literary/art criticism–I have encountered many myths about why writers write. Some of them I even believed myself when I was younger. It is tempting and glamorous to believe that writing is a profession that brings with it fame and fortune. In fact, the Romantic movement disseminated such a myth, presenting the writer as a free spirit that achieves greatness and immortality via his art or fiction. The reality of being a writer is, in most cases, very different and therefore so are the main motivations of contemporary authors. I’d like to describe some of those motivations by going over a few common misconceptions about writing.
Myth 1. Writing is a profession. It’s true that full-time writing takes as much time as any profession does. Moreover, writers seldom take breaks or vacations from writing. It is often an all-consuming enterprise. Ideas and inspiration don’t have a set schedule, even if the writer is very disciplined and writes regularly. Furthermore, a profession implies a more or less steady salary. However, few writers receive a steady income–enough to support themselves and their families–by writing. So, in that sense, writing is not a profession, at least not in the conventional sense of the term. It’s more of an all-consuming passion and a way of lifein which the monetary rewards are uneven and uncertain. In the United States, where I live and publish, writers receive about 5 to 10 percent royalties from the profits made by their books. The percentage depends upon how many copies of their books are sold, how much they cost, and what kind of contract their literary agent (or they, themselves) have negotiated with the publisher. Generally speaking, the more books they sell the larger the author’s royalties, but it seldom exceeds 10 percent. Needless to say, unless your books sell as well as the Harry Potter or Twilight series—and sell movie rights on top of book sales—it’s difficult to imagine making a steady income for an entire family just by writing and publishing books.
Myth 2. Writers want to be famous. As they say here, good luck with that! As far as popular culture is concerned, you have much better chances of becoming famous if you’re an actor or pop star. We can take the Harry Potter series as an example, since it’s so well known internationally. The principal actors of the films—Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson—are far better known than the author of the series, J. K. Rowling, who is nonetheless one of the best known contemporary authors. Generally speaking, far more people would recognize in the street the actors as opposed to the authors of very successful books that have been made into movies. So if you want fame or external recognition, it’s best that you select a profession that is more visible in mainstream culture, such as singing or acting.
Myth 3. Writers want immortality. This is a very tempting Romantic thought for anyone who aspires to achieve greatness. But most professional writers are quickly disabused of this notion. “Immortality” is not a pure Romantic ideal; it’s more of a political and pragmatic reality. It depends upon the processes of cultural consecration. One of the best authors I have read on this subject is Pierre Bourdieu. His books, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature and Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, explain all the politics and social hierarchies involved in making it into the canon, be it in art, music or literature. Attaining this kind of artistic “immortality”—which is so human and ephemeral after all—depends upon a very complex and heavily politicized process that does not favor most authors or lie within their (or their publisher’s) control.
Myth 4. It’s easy to publish. That depends on the avenue of publishing you try. Self-publishing is easy, since now anyone can print their e-books on Amazon Kindle. But the problem with that is that there are so many books out there that it’s tough to reach an audience. If you select this path, you won’t have the promotion or distribution budget that the major publishing houses have at their disposal. And if you want to publish with a large publishing house, at least in the U.S., then you have to go through the usually challenging process of finding a reputable literary agent who is able to place your book. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to have an inside peek at this process. When I was teaching at the University of Michigan, I organized a few panel discussions at the Ann Arbor Book Festival (in 2005, 2006 and 2007). In 2007, Amy Williams, who is Elizabeth Kostova’s literary agent, and Susan Golomb, Jonathan Franzen’s agent were two of the guest speakers in these panels. They discussed, among other things, the publishing process, explaining that they receive as many as 100 to 200 submissions a day from authors seeking representation. This deluge of queries is colloquially called “the slush pile”. Like most very successful agents, they usually sift through the queries and focus mostly on submissions by successful authors they know of or authors recommended by successful authors they know. Only rarely do they find in the slush pile unknown and unrecommended authors they wish to represent, and even in those cases, they are usually students at very reputable M.F.A. programs or have published with important magazines or literary reviews.
So if writing is not a great way to become famous, immortal or even earn a steady income,then why do so many of us want to become writers? I certainly can’t speak for everyone, but I can say that my main motivation for writing has been intellectual and artistic freedom. It’s something that many artists and writers prize dearly. There are few human endeavors as closely tied to freedom as writing. Here’s why.
a) First of all, a writer can’t really thrive without living in a country that respects and protects the freedom of speech. Granted, great writers emerged even during the worst totalitarian regimes. Maxim Gorky, the most prominent writer during the Stalinist era, is a prime example. But even he had to compromise his creativity and abide by the motto coined by Yury Olesha and paraphrased by Stalin himself: “The Production of souls is more important than the production of tanks. And therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul” (Joseph Stalin, “Speech at home of Maxim Gorky,” 26 October 1932). This subordination of art and literature to ideology is one of the saddest thing a culture can do human creativity. It is an engineering of a state of soullessness rather than of the human soul. Writing and the freedom of expression are closely intertwined.
b) It is difficult to write as told. The creative process—particularly for writing fiction–is delicate, quirky and individual. Writers write not only in different genres, but also at different speeds; at their own pace. Some take a lifetime to write their masterpiece; others, like Balzac, write a novel a year. Some require daily discipline; others write in periodic spurts of inspiration. Nothing and nobody can dictate, from the outside, how writers should write. I know this is part of why I preferred being a writer to being an academic. Academic writing is constrained by area of specialization and technical jargon. Fiction is constrained by nothing.Only your capacities and imagination are the limit. “Everything you can imagine is real,” said Picasso. How true!
c) Your creativity is your only real guide. As a writer, you generally have to have in mind a target audience as well as what publishers can sell, to market your book. However, these are very abstract parameters. Nobody can really predict the public taste: not writers, not literary agents, not publishers.For publishers and literary agents, publishing success is like a very well informed gamble. Well informed because they study the market closely and have an intuitive understanding of what sells well. But nobody can predict the next best seller with a high degree of accuracy. That’s why literary agents represent between 100 and 200 authors and why the big, mainstream publishers in the U.S. publish about 200 to 300 books a year. Some of them are with established, brand name authors that are sure to sell well, but many of the new authors have only moderate success. Nobody could have predicted in advance, for instance, that a book of erotic fiction like Fifty Shades of Grey—a genre usually relegated to small, specialized erotica presses and that hasn’t been so wildly popular since Marquis de Sade made a splash in the eighteenth-century—would be this year’s best-seller. Go figure! For writers, agents and publishers alike, public taste is a wild card. You can aim to please a large mainstream audience, but your aim may or may not hit the target.
d) Writing is a celebration of freedom. This is a personal reason. It may not be applicable to all authors, but it was my main motivation for writing fiction. I left Romania as a child, while the country was still in the throes of the worst phase of Ceausescu’s repression. The communist regime had clamped down on the Iron Curtain, instituting increasingly stifling and repressive measures. I wrote my first novel, Velvet Totalitarianism, translated by Mihnea Gafita into Romanian as Intre Doua Lumi (Curtea Veche Publishing, 2011), in order to record palpably, through fiction, a very challenging historical period in Romanian history. I hoped that those of us who lived through it would remember it and that the new generations would learn about it. It’s important to keep in mind the communist past because it’s so easy to repeat it. Not necessarily in the same way, but through supporting similar forms of political repression or corruption that risk depriving us of the basic human rights and freedoms that make not only writing, but also living possible.
How books are made, the process of publishing, who writes them and for what purpose has changed tremendously over time. But one thing remains the same: we still love to read books. Under whatever form–paperback, hardcover, ebooks or audio–books are here to stay. Here are some of the reasons why:
1. Entertainment. Books are still one of the best and most accessible forms of entertainment. We can learn about any subject and travel, in our imagination, to any place and time by reading books. We can even imagine alternative universes. Even better, reading is a very flexible endeavor. We can do it in the privacy of our homes, online through joining reading clubs, or with our neighbors and friends in local book clubs.
2. Socializing. Even solitary reading is an inherently social activity. In reading, we connect with the literary canon or simply with what’s popular at the moment. Chances are that if we’ve heard of a book, it’s already been marketed and promoted widely. Many of us join local book clubs, which become a welcome opportunity of catching up on our friends’ and acquaintances’ lives, enjoying time together, and discussing life in general, not just books. Moreover, via reading and review websites such as Librarything.com, Shelfari.com, and Goodreads.com we can make new acquaintances based on lively discussions and common interests.
3. Acquiring information or knowledge. We often read to learn about how to diet, how to dress, how to parent kids correctly: anything and everything about psychology, art, science, literature, dance or any other subject that interests us. Although nowadays there are many convenient online sources of information, often books provide a level of depth and detail that cannot be replaced by such brief descriptions.
4. Exploring our imagination and leading parallel lives. Most of us assume that we only have one life on Earth. As we grow older, our lives narrow as a result of the choices–of lifestyle, partners, careers, family–we make. Each choice, be it good or bad, determines our direction and eliminates other potential paths in life. Reading is the easiest way to explore other modes of existence, practically risk free. Books carry us to places we’ve not even dreamt of before, to different epochs or styles of life. It is in some ways even more liberating than film because readers fill in the blanks more so than viewers, in imagining characters and situations described only through words. Reading fiction, for instance, places us in the shoes of characters radically different from us and helps us envision what it’s like to live that kind of life. This is why reading is not just a light or passive exercise. It’s also an inherently philosophical and very liberating exercise of our imagination. Through imagining compelling thought experiments–characters, places and situations–reading represents one of the easiest and most creative ways of escaping the limitations of our lives. It gives us the kind of ontological freedom that few other activities can afford. This is why I believe that no matter what transformations the publishing world will go through–and many predict that there will be some major ones in the near future–we will continue to love books.
Paradoxically, it is cultural theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu (author of Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste), Jean Baudrillard (author of Simulacra and Simulation) and Jean-Francois Lyotard (author of The Postmodern Condition) that demolished the concept of “culture” during the twentieth century. Writing mostly for an elite audience, they argued in various ways that high “culture” is an artificial, dated and elitist social institution. The greatest irony is that it’s not these elite cultural theorists, but the general public (in its indifference) that is finishing off the destruction of “culture”: not just on paper or in a discourse, but in reality.
What is culture? Culture can mean 1)the practices, values, beliefs and mores of a given society or a “way of life” and 2) various fields in the arts and humanities, including literature, art, cinema, music, poetry, theater, philosophy, dance, literary and art criticism, among others. I’d like to argue that “culture” in the second sense of the term is essential to our “cultures” in the first sense of the term. I’d like to broach the following questions in this essay: 1) Aside from the institution of the academia and education in general, how do these cultural domains survive and why are they suffering today? My main focus, however, is: 2) Why is culture important to contemporary societies?
1.How does “culture” survive (outside of the academia and educational institutions) and why is it suffering today?
a) Book Clubs. In the U.S. at least, one can’t underestimate the importance of book clubs: both grassroots, neighborhood book clubs that make a difference collectively and those with an enormous impact and readership, such as Oprah’s Book Club. OBC started on the very popular Oprah Winfrey Show in 1996. Each month Oprah and her team of editors selected a new novel to read and discuss on the show, introducing a total of 70 books in 15 years. In June 2012, Oprah started a new book club as a partnership between O: The Oprah Magazine and the new Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN). Oprah’s Book Club brought into the limelight the “high culture” genre that usually has the least readership: literary fiction. Some of the most notable examples are: The Corrections in September 2001 and Freedom in September 2010, both novels by Jonathan Franzen, and Middlesex,Jeffrey Eugenides’s incredible comic epic in June 2007. Since these happen to be some of my favorite novels, I reviewed them on my own blog, Literature Salon:
What is so special about literary fiction? And why does it tend to be read much less than mainstream and genre fiction? Actually, I’d have to qualify that the literary fiction that makes it into the canon of literature tends to be more read than most mainstream fiction because it’s often taught in schools. However, that is the exception, not the rule. Most works of literary fiction have a very limited audience, which is why mainstream publishers tend to avoid it unless the author is already very well known or very promising. What sells most, and what readers tend to prefer reading, is genre fiction such as the Harry Potter and Twilight series (fantasy), or novels by Steven King (horror).
Although the distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction is not cut-and-dry, I’d say that genre fiction places emphasis upon a fast-paced and engaging plot, while literary fiction privileges psychologically nuanced characterizations and a unique, sometimes experimental, style. Genre fiction lends itself to a quick read for a public that has increasingly less leisure time to spend on books and so much audio-visual stimulation to choose from, given the number of cultural shows available on the Internet, TV and radio nowadays. Yet it is the less popular literary and experimental fiction that has greater chances of transforming the field of literature and making us see life—and art—in radically new ways. Unfortunately, the chances for a new novel in this category to gain public visibility by making it on Oprah’s Book Club are probably fewer than winning the lottery. So how is new literature shared with a general audience? This brings me to my next point: public radio and television stations.
b) Culture also makes it to a general audience largely through public television and radio programs that depend upon a combination of government funding and public donations. Unfortunately, during the past few years, television stations such as the British Broad Casting Corporation (BBC) the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the U.S., Arte (Association Relative à la Européene (a Franco-German TV network) and one of my personal favorites, the Romanian station TVR Cultural are all struggling with the interrelated problems of low or nonexistent profits and decreased funding and viewership. Some of these television and radio stations have adapted to the needs of a modern audience; others have floundered and even gone under. Arte TV, for instance, which began transmission in 1992 in France and Germany, has done relatively well, expanding its programs to Belgium, Austria, Israel, the Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland. Some of the French language shows are available in Canada as well. Adapting to changes in technology, Arte TV now has 24-hour broadcasts available in HDTV, via satellite. On the other hand, TVR Cultural, the Romanian public television station founded in 2002 and modeled after Arte TV is scheduled to close in September 2012. Some of its shows will move to TVR 2 and TVR 3. Generally speaking, public educational television—the stations that promote “culture”—are not only non-profit, but also a money losing venture, as was the case in Romania. I’ve read several interesting analyses of the subject and I’m including, for those interested, two relevant article links below.
2) Why is culture important to contemporary societies? To my mind, this dwindling support for “culture” is a very unfortunate phenomenon. I’d like to list some of the reasons why I think so by using as my point of departure a few poignant citations by some of my favorite Romanian authors.
a) “Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds”. ELIE WIESEL
During the most repressive epochs in human history, authors of literary fiction, memoirs and critical essays have been some of the most courageous and outspoken voices of protest. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Natalia Ginsburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind, Lena Constante’s The Silent Escape and, of course, Elie Wiesel’s Night took readers into the horrors, the Kafkaesque show trials, the physical and psychological torture and the general hopelessness that characterized life in totalitarian regimes. Their powerful words of protest reached not only millions of readers, but also entire generations. They echo to this day. Wiesel also famously stated, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference”. It is more difficult to remain indifferent to human suffering when one reads such powerful writing.
b) “Literature is a reflexive art”. ION LUCA CARAGIALE
Caragiale was way ahead of his time in so many ways. He’s quoted often, to this day, in Romanian newspapers because his witty, cynical and poignant remarks about politics apply as much to our contemporary context as they did to his own times. Perhaps Caragiale also foreshadowed the schools of thought—formalism and poststructuralism—that maintain that art and literature are important in and of themselves. This is, of course, not a new conception of art and literature. During the nineteenth-century, Théophile Gautier is credited with coining the notion of “art for art’s sake” (l’art pour l’art). Although art, literature, criticism and philosophy often have moral and social implications, they don’t have to in order to be considered significant. They have an intrinsic value: the expression of human creativity in itself.
c) “Culture kills naïveté and knowledge chases away ignorance”. GEORGE COSBUC
Philosophy, art, criticism and literature don’t simply mirror reality. They transform it, along with our assumptions about it. They change our political and social conventions; they make us question others and ourselves more deeply; they help build the foundations of a new reality. Not reducible to mere ideology or polemics, art, philosophy and literature help us interrogate our assumptions about the world and sometimes lead us to arrive at deeper truths.
d) “The meaning of existence, and every person’s duty, is creation”. MIRCEA ELIADE
This ontological assumption reminds me of an observation that is common sense and repeated often: humankind is the only being on earth that distinguishes himself (or herself) through the powers of thought (and creation), not merely procreation. Our intellectual and artistic capacities are a large part of what makes us human. We should prize these capacities, express them and maximize them.
e) “Criticism is a misconception: We must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves”. EMIL CIORAN
Cioran expresses here a fundamental truth about human creativity: Reading–be it poetry, philosophy or literature–is a largely introspective activity. In books we learn so much about human history, about the motivations for human behavior and most of all, as Cioran eloquently states, about ourselves.
In short, we should preserve “culture” because it helps us question our social conventions and transform them; it stimulates to the maximum our creativity; it’s often the first and last recourse to freedom in repressive social and political circumstances; it’s one of the key elements that make us human; and because human creativity needs to be preserved and respected for its own sake. To conclude with one final quote, as Kenneth Kaunda, the first Zambian president said, “A country without culture is a body without a head”. This basic truth about “culture” applies internationally, to all cultures.
Oprah Winfrey‘s life story reads like the classic American dream, a tale from rags to riches. Born into poverty in Mississippi, Oprah became the most successful talk show host as well as one of the richest and most influential women in the world. She’s also known for being a philantropist, a producer, and now the owner of her own T.V. network. I think, however, that one of her biggest contributions to culture was starting Oprah’s Book Club in 1996 on her already very popular talk show, the Oprah Winfrey Show. Each month Oprah and her team of editors selected a new novel to read and discuss on the show, introducing a total of 70 books in 15 years. In June 2012, Oprah started a new book club called Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 as a partnership between O: The Oprah Magazine and the new Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN). You can see it on this link:
We live in an era multimedia sensory overload; an era in which reality T.V. has overtaken the networks and there’s little room–or time–for quality fiction. Oprah’s Book Clubhas been a force of culture, bringing into the limelight the “high culture” genre that usually has the least readership: literary fiction, including two of Jonathan Franzen‘s novels, The Corrections and Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides‘ Middlesex. It has also stimulated an entire grass-roots culture of neighborhood book clubs, where friends and neighbors meet regularly, face to face, to discuss literature, socialize and catch up on their lives. I’m including below a link to Oprah’s Complete Book Club List:
Arianna Huffington‘s life isn’t a classic immigrant tale from rags to riches, since she comes from a well-off family with powerful connections. Her life is nevertheless the very inspiring success story of a woman who made the most out of the opportunities she had in life. Named by Forbes Magazine in 2009 as one of the most influential women in media, Arianna Huffington was a very popular political commentator and syndicated columnist during the 1990′s. But her crowning achievement is founding The Huffington Post in 2005. The online media blog has thrived and expanded internationally, to include Le Huffington Post in France, Huffington Post UK, Huffington Post Canada and Huffington Post Quebec. Just as Conde Nast Publishing and Hachette Publishing have expanded with several magazines in Eastern Europe, including my native country Romania, I’m hoping that The Huffington Post will as well.
Discussing all aspects of art, entertainment, politics, crime and culture, the highly successful online blog was recently acquired by AOL in February 2011 for a whopping 315 million dollars. Part of The Huffington Post‘s enormous success stems from Arianna Huffington’s pull and connections with wealthy investors. To offer just one notable example, in August 2006, SoftBank Capital invested 5 milliion dollars in the company. However, its success can also be attributed to the high quality of its articles and the popularity of its over 9000 contributors. Without question, The Huffington Post gathered some of the best bloggers in every field it features. Moreover, the blog has not merely adapted, but also stayed one step ahead of the curve in its use of technology, recently introducing “vlogging“–or video blogging–which is taking off and making journalism even more multimedia and interactive.
It is remarkable, yet not surprising, that The Huffington Post is faring better than more traditional newspapers, such as The New York Times, which has been experiencing a steady decline in advertising revenue and was obliged starting March 2011 to start charging for online subscriptions (via instituting a “paywall,” which began paying off by the spring of 2012). The Huffington Post’s quality of journalism is excellent, selected from a very large pool of contributors who are some of the best and most popular in their domains. Because of the variety and quantity of its articles, The Huffington Post also avoids cliquishness (as much as possible in a networking-driven domain). Its guest contributors are often selected because they’re already successful bloggers with mass appeal. However, whether you regard the popularity of blogs over more traditional print journalism as a positive development or not, it’s clear that it’s the wave of the present and maybe also the future. Blogging has changed the publishing industry, particularly journalism, just as the travel industry has been changed as a result of people booking their flights online. Arianna Huffington saw into the future of mass media communication and made it our present. In terms of content, The Huffington Post treads perfectly the balance between reaching a general audience and engaging, well-written pieces. It offers culture with a mainstream appeal: the only kind, I believe, likely to make a big impact in our times.
Two of the most major transformations in the U.S. publishing industry over the past few decades have been a) the rising importance of literary agents since the 1980’s and b) the rise of e-books in the early 2000’s. While in Romania and France unagented submissions remain the norm, it’s almost impossible to publish a book with the large publishing houses in the U.S.– particularly fiction–without representation by a very reputable literary agent. Agents sift through the enormous number of submissions and recommend to the editors of the major publishers the books they believe will sell well. I found this out not from a book about the publishing industry, but directly from one of my favorite American writers, John Updike.
Velvet Totalitarianism by Claudia Moscovici
In 2003, when I had finished a few chapters of my first novel, Velvet Totalitarianism (published by Editura Curtea Veche in Romanian translation under the title Intre Doua Lumi), I wrote a hand-written note to John Updike. I told him about my background and the subject of my novel—namely, life under the Ceausescu regime in communist Romania and immigrating to the U.S.—and asked him, if he liked the chapters he read, to recommend me to his literary agent. It was a longshot, but worth a try. To my pleasant surprise, he responded–also in a hand-written note–offering very positive input about the sample chapters I had sent him but telling me that he never had a literary agent. He worked directly with the publishing house. This was common practice during the 1960’s, when John Updike began publishing. By 2003, however, unmediated contact between writers and editors was practically unheard of in the U.S., where the major publishing houses had long instituted a policy of not accepting unagented submissions. So how does a writer go about finding a literary agent?
Intre Doua Lumi de Claudia Moscovici
You can do it the hard way, which, quite frankly, has relatively small chances of success: buy the latest edition of The Writer’s Market, which lists the contact information for literary agents in the U.S. There you have to figure out who are the most successful agents as well as sift out agents who charge to read your manuscript (this practice has become increasingly unpopular) from those who don’t. Then you send them a query—by regular mail or, more rarely, by email—introducing yourself and your credentials; describing your book; explaining why you think it would sell well and including a few sample chapters. I later found out from agents themselves why this impersonal process is not likely to yield positive results for most authors. When I was teaching at the University of Michigan, I organized a few panel discussions at the Ann Arbor Book Festival (in 2005, 2006 and 2007). In 2007, Amy Williams, who is Elizabeth Kostova’s literary agent, and Susan Golomb, Jonathan Franzen’s agent were two of the guest speakers in these panels. They discussed, among other things, the publishing process, explaining that they receive as many as 100 to 200 submissions a day from authors seeking representation. This deluge of queries is colloquially called “the slush pile”. Like most very successful agents, they usually sift through the queries and focus mostly on submissions by successful authors they know of or authors recommended by successful authors they know. Only rarely do they find in the slush pile unknown and unrecommended authors they wish to represent, and even in those cases, they are usually students at very reputable M.F.A. programs or have published with important magazines or literary reviews. So if you don’t want to go through the time-consuming process of finding an agent or don’t make it past their slush pile, what do you do next? As mentioned, writing directly to the editors of the major publishing houses is no longer an option nowadays. So logically, you would try avenues that don’t require agent representation: medium-sized or small independent publishing houses. This avenue, however, has also become increasingly narrow over the past ten years.
During the 1990’s many of the small and independent publishing houses have folded or were bought by the major publishers. There are some noteworthy exceptions: my own publishing house, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, which is, as they advertise, the “largest independent publishing house in North America” has continued to expand by buying smaller publishers and has begun to publish fiction works by successful authors who have already published scholarship with them (as was my situation). There are also several small publishers that publish between 2 and 10 books a year; academic publishers that publish mostly scholarship (and are often non-profit or low-profit, partly sponsored by universities) and increasingly few medium-sized publishing houses like MacAdam/Cage in San Francisco. I’m including below a list of some of the medium-sized and small independent publishing houses in the U.S.:
If you succeed in publishing your book with one of these independent publishers, you may be more fortunate than you think. Although smaller publishing houses have correspondingly smaller publicity budgets than the big publishers, please keep in mind (as the agents on the panels I organized discussed), that the big publishers don’t divide their annual publicity and promotion budget evenly among the hundreds of books they publish each year. Celebrities that publish with them—such as Paris Hilton or former president George Bush publishing their autobiographies—have their own publicity agents who help a lot with the promotion of their books. In addition, because of their name recognition, the media helps spread the word and the popularity of their books. So basically the major publishers invest most of their annual publicity budget on the new books they believe will sell best. Those are usually represented by the most reputable literary agents and sell at auction. An auction is when several of the big publishing houses bid for the same book. To offer an example from one of the book fair panels I organized, in 2005 Little Brown & Company won the bid for Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, an exquisite work of literary fiction about the legend of Vlad Tepes/Dracula. They invested about 2 million dollars, or a large chunk of their annual publicity budget, into promoting that novel. This bid paid off because the novel was very successful internationally as well as because it sold movie rights to Sony Pictures in 2007. As we’ve seen through the enormous success of the Harry Potter and Twilight Series, novels that become blockbuster movies grow exponentially in popularity.
But by far most writers publishing with the big publishing houses don’t fall into the category of “celebrities” whose books practically sell themselves or hit the jackpot with getting most of the publicity budget of that publisher for that year. In those (majority) cases, even if they manage to catch the interest of one of the best literary agents and to publish with a major publisher, they still have to work very hard to promote their books.
Ebooks and Self-Publishing
Given that the odds are heavily stacked against new authors, it’s not surprising that many of them choose to self-publish e-books, via, for instance, the very popular Amazon Kindle program. Unlike publishing with vanity presses that charge a lot of money to print books, this option is easy and inexpensive. But there’s a large downside to it as well: there are so many books out there, particularly now that anyone can self-publish their work on Kindle and other venues, that the sea of information has become so vast that each author who lacks a large promotion budget and media connections is nothing more than a drop in the ocean of books and deluge of information. To rise to the surface requires a lot of ingenuity, luck and networking.
Like many authors, I’ve been asked the question of where do I believe the publishing industry is heading next. I think that self-publishing will grow and that the future is already here with e-books. E-books have the advantage of cutting out most of the distribution cost. This is a huge advantage for both authors and publishers, since the cost of shipping books all over the world is very high. This is why authors generally receive only between 5 and 10 percent royalties from the (hardcopy) books they publish. The percentage of royalties depends in part on the number of copies sold (the more it sells, the bigger the royalties for the author) and in part on what kind of contract a given author or agent is able to negotiate with the publisher. Still, for most authors, 5 to 10 percent profits is not enough to make a living just by writing books. Since e-books don’t have the same distribution costs, authors can negotiate more advantageous contracts. E-books are also very convenient for readers, since it’s so much easier to carry around with you a Kindle or Nook than twenty or thirty books. It’s true that many people still prefer to leaf through an actual book. But I believe this preference is largely a matter of habit; of what they grew up doing. In the next few years, my daughter’s school system is planning to replace hardcopy textbooks with e-books. This transition will soon happen in schools throughout the country, such that the kids starting primary school will probably not even hold books in their hands. Those growing up strictly on e-books in school, with little standard of comparison, are not likely to prefer actual books as adults.
Foreseeing such major transitions, the major publishing houses are trying to adapt best to the new media and new demands of readers. I’m including below a relevant article on this topic by Christine Kearney (Reuters) about Book Expo America:
The one major current downside of e-books is that they’re still, for the most part, tied to the companies that produce the e-readers—such as Amazon for Kindle—which are not universally adaptable to other reading programs. If they were, then the risk of losing profits would be much higher: it would mean that anyone could forward a book by email, so nobody would need to pay for it.
Hypotheses about the future of publishing:
a) Print books versus e-books
So what predictions do I make about the future of publishing in the U.S.? I think that for the generations of readers that were brought up on print books, they will continue to cherish reading an actual book as well as adapt to the convenience of e-books. The new generations, brought up just on e-books in schools, will choose them over hardcopy books in the same way that kids brought up on computers don’t use typewriters. The publishers that can see into this near future and dominate the e-book market will be the ones that will rise in power and influence in the publishing industry.
b) Promoting and marketing your book(s)
The era of the timid or reclusive author, shying away from or outright rejecting the media and contact with readers, is long gone. Whether you publish with a big publishing house, a smaller independent publisher or on your own, you have to be willing to share your work with others through every venue and opportunity you can. Aside from networking, promoting through the new media—such as book trailers, music videos and films—will grow in importance. We are becoming, internationally, visual cultures predicated upon instant gratification. Videos make a direct and immediate impact on viewers, tempting them to find out more about your book. I was fortunate enough to collaborate with very talented Romanian photographers, actors, musicians and music producers on the book trailers for my novel, Velvet Totalitarianism/Intre Doua Lumi—Andy Platon, Anthony Icuagu, Marcel Lovin, Ioana Picos, Mihai Marin, Claudiu Ciprian Popa, Elena Rotaru, Elena Xing, Andrei Dombrovski–to which I’m extremely grateful and with whom I hope to collaborate again for future book launches.
Film in particular is a mixture of all the arts and a feast for the senses. Authors who succeed in working with movie directors and having their novels made into films will increase the chances of success for their books.
c) Literary agents
As mentioned, the influence of literary agents in the U.S. and Great Britain has risen to enormous proportions during the 1990’s and early 2000’s, but it is now waning for two main reasons. First of all, as I explained earlier, there’s a bottleneck of “slush pile” submissions. This means that the most reputable literary agents are no longer accessible to most authors. Secondly, self-publishing has improved—in both reputation and the possibilities for success it offers–giving authors the chance to succeed on their own. The number who succeed in becoming best sellers in any venue or through any process is very small. This will not change, no matter what changes the publishing industry undergoes. Huge mainstream success is hard to attain and depends upon so many factors outside the author’s and publisher’s control. But keep in mind that success is a journey not a destination and enjoy every step of the process of writing, publishing and promotion, each of which presents so many challenges and rewards.
literaturesalon
