Denisa’s Shelf (Raftul Denisei): A Great Selection of Literary Classics

Denisa’s Shelf/Raftul Denisei

Denisa’s Shelf (Raftul Denisei): A Great Selection of World Fiction

by Claudia Moscovici

The number of books published each year worldwide is astronomical. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) cites that roughly 2,200,000 books are published annually. Out of curiosity, I looked up the two countries I write about most which, not accidentally, are also those where I’ve lived: the U.S. and Romania. In 2010, 328,259 were published in the U.S. and in 2008 14, 984 books were published in Romania. Given this large number of books published in the U.S. alone, it’s difficult to believe how difficult and competitive the process of publishing can be (as I explain in an earlier article on the subject):

http://literaturesalon.wordpress.com/2012/08/08/how-the-publishing-process-works-in-the-united-states-a-writers-perspective/

And yet publishing is only the beginning of the effort of rising to the surface in culture in an ocean of books. In fact, the UNESCO study probably doesn’t even count the number of self-published books via Amazon Kindle, Lulu and many other self-publishing options. Moreover, only a small fraction of these books have to do with what we’d loosely call “culture“: literature, art, philosophy, religion, film, etc. It is difficult to assess exactly how many, since the number is determined not only by their subject but also by the quality of their research and writing, which in turn are measured by highly debated standards. In fact, the difference between “high” culture and “pop” culture itself has been undermined long ago, by theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-François Lyotard. We may never be able to assess the practical effect of these anti-hierarchy cultural theories. However, what has become crystal clear during the past 20 years is that the age of mass media itself mixes everything in cyberspace–the latest celebrity gossip, political events, the latest trend in dance with poetry and literature of all kinds, to list just a few things–in a hodgepodge and constant overflow of information. For those of us (artists, writers, critics, philosophers, film directors, etc) invested in making a difference in the loosely defined field of “culture,” it is quite difficult to swim–or even stay afloat–in this vast and rapidly changing current of information.

On the one hand, the mass media makes sharing our cultural products easier in some ways, by facilitating access to an audience. For instance, anyone can self-publish and promote a novel nowadays, through blogs, twitter,  youtube and other popular venues on the internet. But this democratization of culture also makes it tougher to stand out from the (enormous and growing) crowd. Each cultural product–be it a novel, a collection of poems, a song, a film or a painting–competes with millions of others. It’s hard to find or discern anymore what we value and what we don’t, or what we find meaningful and what we find meaningless, in this tidal wave of information that assails us from all directions on a daily basis. To draw another analogy, it’s as if we heard talented classical musicians playing their instruments at the same time as others howl, scream, talk and yell in various languages. Or, if you prefer to avoid making any value judgments, as if we heard them playing at the same time as other talented musicians practice other songs. Either way you look at it, what reaches our ears will sound like a maddening cacophony, to the point that we can no longer discern the music we prefer from  the surrounding noise we’d like to ignore.  And yet, it is still worth trying to hear the music we enjoy, as I argue in my previous article on the importance of culture for our contemporary cultures:

http://literaturesalon.wordpress.com/2012/08/25/saving-culture-on-the-importance-of-culture-to-contemporary-cultures/

In previous articles, I’ve discussed aspects of Romanian culture that I found the most worthwhile and talented, including the world-class fiction of Razvan Petrescu and Dumitru Radu Popa,  as well as the George Enescu Festival in classical music. Today I’d like to present another influential and talented Romanian author and editor, Denisa Comanescu, whose selection of world fiction, called Denisa’s Shelf (Raftul Denisei),  features some of the best literature from around the world in Romanian translation. 

Denisa Comanescu

A talented poet herself, who published verses in the prestigious Romania Literara (1975) and other literary journals from a very young age, Denisa Comanescu obtained a poetry prize from Revista Luceafarul in 1978 (named after a famous poem by the greatest Romanian poet, Mihai Eminescu). She also won the Young Author’s Prize (Premiul de debut) from the Union of Writers in 1979 for the volume The Chase from Paradise (Izgonirea din Paradis, Editura Cartea Romaneasca, 1979). In 1999, she was awarded the  Prize of the Book Salon as well as of the Poetry Festival of Oradea. In her audiobook, The Obsession of Biography (Obsesia biografiei, Humanitas Multimedia), which is a collection of  72 poems recited by the author herself, Denisa states:

“For me, poetry is a kind of fight against forgetfulness, an attempt to decipher the puzzle of existence, when my life is constantly invaded by the fiction of others. It’s very difficult to arrive at the calm during which I can question myself; to work profoundly on loss (to paraphrase a verse by Valery). One needs time to oneself during which one can create connections with the significance of daily life. Only rarely do I have that time to myself.” Denisa Comanescu

„Pentru mine, poezia e un fel de lupta impotriva uitarii, o incercare de a descifra puzzle-ul existentei, cand existenta mea e invadata mai tot timpul de fictiunea altora. Este foarte greu sa ajung la calmul prin care sa ma interoghez pe mine insami, sa lucrez in adanc asupra pierderii (ca sa parafrazez un vers din Valery). Ai nevoie de un timp al tau in care sa poti taia conexiunile cu ceea ce inseamna cotidianul. Mi se intampla rar sa acced la acest timp al meu. ” Denisa Comanescu

As much as she struggles to find the time–and peace and quiet–for her own creative work, Denisa Comanescu also has to find it for the work of others in her collection of world fiction, called Denisa’s Shelf (Raftul Denisei). This is not an easy process. In this collection, she must choose among the tens of millions of books published in the world, selecting those that have cultural value and endurance and that will, at the same time, please the public and generate book sales.  The two goals don’t always coincide, since as everyone knows, the books that sell most aren’t necessarily masterpieces of world literature.

The page Denisa’s Shelf describes the balancing act  required in presenting some of the the best works in world fiction in an accessible and appealing manner for the general public:

“Inaugurated in the spring of 2006, Denisa’s Shelf–the first personalized collection in Romania–demonstrates that accessibility and literary value can be and actually are compatible. On Denisa’s Shelf you can find works by consecrated authors, winners or nominees for prestigious literary awards (Nobel, Booker, Pulitzer, Goncourt, Orange, Cervantes, etc.) alongside exceptional beginners. There’s a great emphasis placed upon the fiction of young authors who have already made a name for themselves in international fiction: in other words, tomorrow’s classics. In this manner, on Denisa’s Shelf  Yasunari Kawabata meets Jonathan Sfran Foer, John Updike meets Jeanette Winterson, Anais Nin encounters Mo Yan, Naghib Mahfuz meets with Tash Aw, Gregor von Rezzori with James Frey, in a double public and critical success.”

“Inaugurată în primăvara anului 2006, Raftul Denisei – prima colecţie personalizată din România – demonstrează că accesibilitatea şi valoarea literară pot fi şi chiar sunt compatibile. Pe Raftul Denisei găsiţi operele unor scriitori consacraţi, laureaţi sau nominalizaţi ai unor prestigioase premii literare internaţionale (Nobel, Booker, Pulitzer, Goncourt, Orange, Cervantes etc.), alături de cele ale unor debutanţi de excepţie. O pondere importantă in selecţia titlurilor o ocupă ficţiunile scriitorilor tineri impuşi deja pe pieţele de carte din lume – de fapt, clasicii de mâine. Astfel, pe „Raftul Denisei“, Yasunari Kawabata se întâlneşte cu Jonathan Safran Foer, John Updike cu Jeanette Winterson, Anais Nin cu Mo Yan, Naghib Mahfuz cu Tash Aw, Gregor von Rezzori cu James Frey, într-un dublu standard al succesului de public şi de critică.”

Combining canonized works with rising stars in world literature, to return to my earlier analogy, Denisa’s Shelf (see link below), offers readers a quiet and peaceful cultural space where they can enjoy a great selection of literary classics. 

http://www.humanitas.ro/humanitas-fiction/raftul-denisei

Claudia Moscovici, Literature Salon

Razvan Petrescu’s Rubato: The Coordinates of World-Class Romanian Fiction

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.

Claudia Moscovici, Literature Salon

 

Celebrating Romanian Culture Internationally

Romanian Culture

My new youtube video celebrates Romanian culture, internationally:

Claudia Moscovici, literaturesalon

Review of Saints, Winds and Other Happenings by D. R. Popa

Saints, Winds and Other Happenings by D. R. Popa

After the Soviet occupation of Romania and the establishment of communism, the Secret Police (an organization developed from the Securitate in 1948, a kind of Romanian NKVD), committed many attrocities against the Romanian people. To offer just one example among many, they began a whole-scale oppression of religious institutions and individuals, particularly those affiliated with the Greek Catholic church. Having instituted an atheist empire in Eastern Europe, Stalin couldn’t tolerate a religion deferent to the pope in Rome in a neighboring country.

However, religion couldn’t be stomped out completely in Romania. Greek Catholics were tortured and forced to convert to the Romanian Orthodox Church, an institution that was already controlled by the Romanian Workers’ Party and the Securitate. Those who refused to submit spent many years in the communist prison camps in Sighet, Gherla, Jilava. Many were forced into into slave labor, to construct the infamous Canal of Death, called so because thousands of people died in unspeakably harsh conditions.

Dumitru Radu Popa’s new novel, written in Romanian under the title Sfinti, Vinturi si Alte Intimplari (Saints, Winds and Other Happenings), narrates these historical events in a personalized fashion, from the perspective of a family caught in the unforgiving gusts of history. Of course, this is not a history textbook, but a work of fiction, embellished by the author’s rich imagination. Although the novel has elements of realism–including the dialogue, which reads as spoken and natural, and the poignant descriptions of human suffering–it also incorporates elements of magical realism.

In literature, magical realism is associated with the works of Nobel-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose novels One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) play with myth and fantasy in their representations of reality. The critic Matthew Strecher defines magical realism as “what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.” In Marquez’s fiction, the depiction of everyday human lives takes on allegorical, and even mythic, proportions. Trespassing the boundaries between reality and imagination, magical realism taps into myth and fantasy to offer a deeper version of reality.

This is precisely the effect D.R. Popa achieves in his newest novel. The author states in our recent interview: “We’re not talking about a realist story, since I’m missing many historical elements which I was obliged to invent under the form of magical realism. So certain natural forces contribute to the plot, just as certain imaginary, symbolic characters give an epic dimension to the historical fiction.” (interview of December 17, 2011)

Hence, the twisted tale of Judge Anton Pasca (Uncle Toni), who pretends to be crazy to save himself and his family; the prolonged sufferings of the Catholic nuns Vianeea and Cornelia (based on the author’s aunt); the tragic death of Bubi (based on his uncle) and the illness and death of Professor Iosif Lewandowsky (inspired by his grandfather) all seem to be the products of a greater destiny, epitomized by symbolic charcters (such as the Nightman and Forrest Girl), not just names in the pages of a fragile human history that risks being forgotten or erased.

In the realist tradition, fiction is grounded in fact. In Dumitru Radu Popa’s magical realism, however, we see the opposite process at work. History is raised to a higher plane by a spell-binding tale that offers a passionate testimonial of survival through faith.

The author informs us that Romanian edition of Saints, Winds and Other Happenings (Sfinti, vanturi si alte intimplari) will be launched at the Libraria Bastilia (Piata Romana, Bucharest) on September 14, 2012 at 6:30 p.m. (http://www.curteaveche.ro/Sfinti_vanturi_si_alte_intamplari-3-1472). 

Claudia Moscovici, literaturesalon

http://www.amazon.com/Seducer-Novel-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0761858075/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1326297451&sr=1-1