American Literary Translators Association

Panel on Contemporary Romanian Literature

Boston, November 14, 2003

Stories from a Shapeless World

                                                                                                             by Bogdan Suceavă

     First of all, I would like to thank the organizers for inviting me.

I think the most natural question that comes in our mind when we talk about Romanian contemporary fiction is the following: What is the particular experience of today’s Romanian writers? In a recent interview in the newspaper Ziua, Alex. Ştefănescu, talking about the major themes in contemporary Romanian literature today, said that we have been witnesses to one of history’s the major tragedies. He was referring to the twentieth century as a whole. He suggested that this experience might still await its best literary expression in Romania. I believe that what he had in mind was not only non-fiction reports on, say, the Gulag experience, but also the literary expression of the deep transformations of the human being, as a consequence of these major historic events. Do we have stories (movies, novels, or plays) expressing/recording, with a high degree of accuracy, the measure of the deformations that took place in Romania over the last sixty years or so? To point out just one important difference, maybe Ştefănescu’s remark meant that it was impossible to live for decades in a world without private property, without experiencing major changes on the way that Homo sapiens thinks, behaves, speaks. It is a complex process. For a while it looked and maybe still looks like another planet, and our challenge, as writers, is to tell stories about it.

How did I answer this challenge? Somehow, I detect, I feel, I sense the “critical points” in the Romanian past or present, and I tell stories about them. These critical points are our chance to explore the present. However, if our inspiration comes from the past, they are not quite the stories you would find in the history book. One of the stories I wrote is about the first hot air balloon flight in Romania. It happened at the beginning of the nineteenth century. To tell this story I looked for a character that witnesses the event and, somehow, doesn’t really believe it. There is a moment of interpretation. Can humans really fly? I preferred to work with a subjective narrative voice. I needed a character with skeptical eyes. I felt I needed such a character to view the events. And, together, as we listen to the story, we view through his eyes the prince of Vallachia and his family and we see the German guests preparing to fly their balloon. We see the balloon rising in the sky, and we hear the bishop saying that watching it might be a sin. At the end, the entire crowd, the city of Bucharest itself gets twisted together in a huge human knot. They can’t move anymore, and can’t go home anymore. They have seen the man flying and now they know that flying is possible: they are petrified.

I got the idea for this short story in 1991. It “haunted” me for over a decade and I was able to write it in a form that I liked only ten years later, while I was living in Michigan. I searched the library for witnesses to the event and, as of today, I am not sure if any first-hand written record exists. It is a story that tells something more about Bucharest and its people. The story of the German aviator and his Romanian audience could be a metaphor of cultural differences between West and East, a metaphor for the clash between progress and cultural traditions.

iiI have been living in the United States since 1996. Over the last seven years I have written in Romanian about Romania. My short stories have been published in literary magazines back home, so most of my readers are in Romania. These short stories have been collected in two volumes that appeared in Romania. Over the last three years my texts have been published also in internet magazines. Some of the readers on the internet come from various corners of the world. Romanian-born readers from Canada, Israel, Australia, the United States, Romania or Moldova. At some point I have discovered that my readers want to see stories speaking about their own experiences, stories about the distance between their experiences from back home and their present reality. They expect a writer to talk about this change. Over the last three years I have received continuous feedback from people from all over the world, either in literary e-groups, or by private e-mail messages.

One of my texts was very well received: a story about the early eighties when Romania experienced a serious shortage of energy. I wrote it in Arizona, some three years ago. In a small Romanian town, every evening all the lights have to be turned off, to save energy. The story is narrated from the perspective of a 10 year old kid. It’s hard to finish one’s homework when the city, or the party, turns the lights off. The teenager’s dad is a Hollywood-addicted average man and desperately wants to watch the Saturday night t.v. show, which happens to be Rich Man Poor Man, the 1976 mini-series starring Nick Nolte and Peter Strauss. The solution is purely technical: he produces the energy he needs for his TV set with the help of a machine that makes Edison’s inventions seem merely toys. He invents a machine that transforms cigarette smoke into energy.

For me this story was a good chance to write a comedy about our well-known survival skills in the most adverse conditions. It’s also a measure of a certain transformation of the character. He solves his problem spending a lot of energy and imagination to get a very basic right, the right to watch a movie.

Even after so many years in the United States, the subjects that most interest me are still inspired from the Romanian reality. I see these story plots even better now, as the distance allows me perspective. I learned more about Romania since I started living in the United States. While in Romania, I was in the midst of the events. Now, it’s a good time to analyze, to remember, to tell stories. I know the place and the people very well: I’ve traveled all over Romania, for many years, starting with the seventies. Then, I know quite a few details about its past. At some point, in one of my stories, I needed a voice to report an outstanding historical event, a voice from the seventeenth century. I created a language that was part imitation of the Moldavian chroniclers from those times, part my own invention. The story is about the prince of Moldavia who sends a ship to the new lands of America to claim new territories and establish a colony there. The ship doesn’t get too far. A storm crashes it against a rock in the Black Sea and the storyteller, a monk, survives the shipwreck by walking over the stormy waters. He then lives for many years in a monastery in Athos Mountains. Later on, he tries to explain the failure of the exploratory mission. This is how we get the story.

There is a certain advantage in working with a reality that one knows so well. The last four hundred years are my “home,” not in the sense of location, but in the sense of language. There are infinitesimal nuances that depend on the narrative time, on location, on the story itself. I feel them pretty well in Romanian context, and in this sense I have to confess I need Romanian in order to express them.

Contrary to what one might think, I don’t specifically look to write stories with fantastic “resolutions”. I arrive at these resolutions by expressing the difference between what I saw and what I thought it should be. A fantastic solution gauges the difference between the “actual reality” and the space within which we project our wishes, our dreams, and our hopes. What is the Romanian society changing into? Because we know for sure it can’t stay like it is now, caught in the middle of a very complex change. What is the shape of our present world? One works with a shapeless material, and that’s why fantastic motives emerge to explain what we think that we see with our own eyes.

It should be noted that I am not the only Romanian fiction writer exploring these fantastic motives.

In 1995, the Nemira Award for fiction was given to Petre Barbu, for his novel God Bless America. According to the author, he wrote the book after traveling to the United States for the first time, in the early nineties. It’s a story about a family with a lot of problems. The elder son leaves the family and, as the rumor goes (since we never know for sure by the end of the book), he heads for America. America is a land far away, maybe a dream, maybe a rumor, we can’t be sure. The daughter tries to make a living in her hometown, which is some unspecified city on the shores of Black Sea. She discovers a special way of entertaining the Polish tourists who happen to sunbathe on the beach: she swims in the sand. The mother and the father are trying to adapt to a new world, a world they don’t really understand. They watch TV, but they don’t get it. Downtown, one can see the foundations of a new building: it’s the new American consulate. It’s not the only change. The tall apartment building where the family lives starts losing some of its apartments. During the long evenings, one could hear the wind howling through the holes left in the structure by the missing walls. By the end of the novel, only a few walls are still standing. Suddenly, the elder son appears on TV: he is a US Marine participating in the peace mission in Somalia. The family watches him and can’t believe their eyes. America is there, on CNN. However, as readers, we wonder whether the family really  understands what they see. It’s one thing to watch CNN from Atlanta, and another thing to watch it, at the beginning of the nineties, from the shores of the Black Sea, from a half deserted city where everybody dreams about leaving the place.

Some of the metaphors used by Petre Barbu in this story are direct. I think any Western reader will have no problem seeing through them. However, some others are so “Romanian”, that even for some Romanian readers they may sound a bit odd. Are we prepared to accept that the distance separating us from the Western world could be so large? The common ground of the stories I have presented today is that the author uses fantastic solutions to describe the flaws of logic, the anomalies of the reality. And sensing or recognizing these contemporary Romanian abnormalities gives the authors the literary motivation to write their stories.