My rating: 4/5
Book review:
In Romanian, the word fugă has a double meaning: that of run/flight and that of fugue, the polyphonic musical composition in which the theme is repeated by several voices and developed through the counterpoint technique. The word is used in this novel both ways: the main character is caught in a perpetual and futile run, while the novel is structured similarly to a Bach fugue, with different voices that replay and develop the main theme, but also with additions that extend the complexity of the story.
As a critic states in the foreword, this novel which cannot be retold has, precisely for that reason, a fresh quality, even after 40 years from its conception. Founder of the oneiric aestheticism, Dumitru Ţepeneag conceived his first novel after the logic (or non-logic) of dreams, as opposed to the surrealism, which uses dreams as a source of images and motifs.
My rating: 5/5
Book review:
I am reading Satantango at my parents' house. A communist block of flats, tiny cubicles with thin walls, through which the noise of a Tv set penetrates from my neighbor upstairs. Later on, my mother comes in my room and falls asleep on my bed. Poor mom, she is always so tired... Soon, the muffled noise of the Tv intermingles with my mother's snores. I am expelled from the depths of evil; I leave behind the colony, the putrid rooms, the decay. I come back to my banal reality. I glimpse at the half-eaten cake, the orderly room, my warm feet. I hold the book open with my toes, fingers plucked deep in my ears. Slowly, word upon word, I can hear once again the rumbling of thunder, the incessant tapping of rain. Shadowy hands pull me once more inside the sickening gloom and despair. I am back in the colony, caught up in a maddening Satan's tango.
My rating: 4/5
Nothing is incompatible in Romania.
In 1986, at the age of 50 and three years before the fall of communism in Romania, Norman Manea decided to emigrate abroad, first to Germany, later reaching the final destination - The Paradise, The Other World, The United States. He was to come back one decade later, in 1997.
The return visit, awaited with doubts and apprehension, awakens memories from his previous life. Through a non-linear chronology and convoluted narrative, he slowly reconstructs the image of his family and friends, while recollecting the experiences that shaped him: Holocaust, Communism, Exile and, above all, his Jewish origin. It is a pretext to muse on subjects such as language, identity, history, belonging, formation, ambiguity and adaptation.
My rating: 4/5
Book review:
You will be lost, you are not going home, you are gone, silence will claim you, suck your life down into its black waters and churn out stars that might remember you, but if they do they will not say, they will not say, and if no one will say your name you are forgotten. I am forgotten.
You are not forgotten, Agnes Magnúsdóttir. Centuries apart, a woman from the other end of the world was spellbound by your story; after long years of research, she crafted a novel abounding in historical details, completing the missing pieces with her own imagination. You are brought to life again, mysterious being with dark hair and strange blue eyes, barely known by her peers; you are given a voice to speak for yourself in words of poetry.
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