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.
It would be impossible for me to make a summary of the plot in Vain Art of the Fugue because, in effect, there is no plot in this novel. There is neither a beginning nor an ending, there is only a middle, subjected to a continuous transformation, a middle seen from different viewpoints and observed as if through a magnifying glass. This middle is composed from several threads which run almost in parallel - we cannot discern if they spring from a common source or if they will reunite at a later point. Moreover, these threads sprout ramifications or they metamorphose completely, making it impossible to grasp at a whole, coherent story.
There are, on the other hand, a couple of thematic cores which can be retold: a man carrying a bouquet (the main character) runs after the bus which is about to leave the station. The same man is caught up in recurrent scenes with two women, Maria and Magda, between whom he oscillates constantly. An old man released from prison heads to the train station under an overpowering sun. A man gets ready to slay a pig in a courtyard, watched by three women carrying washing bowls. The bus driver launches into a stubborn race with a pedestrian turned runner; the latter is determined to outrun the bus, while the former ignores the bus stops and traffic lights.
These scenes function like paintings in a museum of memory, which the curator revisits every so often, inspecting them closely, observing the details, uncovering or inventing new stories. It is no wonder, then, that the characters' identity can undergo transformations: the man hurrying to the station becomes a child playing with a toy train; the two women, Maria and Magda, gradually lose their individuality (which is uncertain from the beginning) and merge into a single being, bearing the same initial, M.
The characters seem to be stuck in the same sequences, which are replayed over and over again, despite their efforts to advance, to surpass them. A situation, a movement, a word suddenly projects them into another place and time. The past and present seem to cohabitate, instituting an impossibility of movement.
The narrative's leit-motif, almost turned into an obsession, is to reach the train station, where the main character has to meet someone. Whether he is forced to get out of the bus, or the driver no longer stops, or he takes the wrong bus, the train station remains a destination which seems impossible to reach.
The universe of the novel is, at the same time, a strange yet domestic one, inhabited by cyclists and fish, knives and hens, by flights in different shapes and forms - after the bus, tram or train, but also a flight from reality, from a closure which appears too painful to be known or accepted. The events seem to run in circles, closing in on a distressing core which they circumscribe tentatively, yet obsessively. In the rush of flights, we can glimpse at the image of a child whose father was incarcerated - a father turned political prisoner, locked up and tortured under the communist regime. A most painful shift of identity.
The recurrent world of the novel seems flooded with fish: in a net at the back of a bicycle or on a kitchen table; in a woman's arms or in a peasant's basket; floating in the sky or emerging from a pregnant woman's belly. The fish, passive and inert in the beginning, are infused with life later on, as if through a miracle. In a shopping bag they bite, hungrily, from loaves. Once left out of sight, they crawl on the pavement or on the floor, in an attempt to hide and escape from a certain death.
Although this is a short novel, I couldn't read it in one sitting; I felt a strange dizziness, a bizarre fatigue, inflicted by the almost maddening repetition of the same sequences. And yet, the novel is far from being boring: the events, although having a similar pattern, change continually, with variations that enlarge and amplify the story, with new details added progressively, with surrealist, scaled-down vignettes imbued with a dark, delicious humor. It is the beauty of the augmented detail, in which the observant eye can discover a fabulous world, descended as if from a dream.
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