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A
black comedy set in 1960s Romania: a Stalinist propaganda
film truck rumbles into a forgotten Transylvanian village.
The occupants of the village believe in the traditional
values of church and God and are in no mood to participate,
placing obstacles in the way of the Cinematography Caravan
crew. The resultant humour is deliberately provincial
as the villagers find their own unique ways of dealing
with them while they're in town.
Cover
Art and Colour Section
Alexandru Radvan questions essential problems of meaning
and reality, the dominance of Christian belief structures,
and so-called European 'civilisation'. Nihilistic in
tone, like Grosan, his art questions rhetorics of truth
and uncertainty.
Ioan
Grosan
Romanian Writers' Prize for Prose
A fiction writer, playwright and journalist. His novels
and stories focus on the everyday, on banal events,
with an acute sense of kitsch. Play, experimentation
and irony characterise and energise the texts, yet there
is an undercurrent of bitterness and a crystallisation
of melancholy.
A
typical case of post-modernism, in which naivety has
been replaced by an ironic consciousness of the library
from which the text is nourished, Grosan's prose is,
however, an indisputable proof of essential engagement,
in all its variety: one of the writer's eyes watches
the convulsions of being, its eternal dramas, while
the other gazes behind literature, scrutinising its
past.
Radu
G. Teposu
Founding member of the Association of Professional Romanian
Writers - ASPRO
 Interview
with Ioan Grosan
When did you start writing
and how long was it before your short stories and books
were first published in Romania and beyond?
I began to write while I was in lycee, at the beginning
of the 1970s - short stories without any great literary
value. It was not until I was a student of Philology
at the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, and above all
writing for the Equinox student magazine, that I began
to take it more seriously, to follow a rigorous programme
of reading, and to be more exigent with myself and with
what I wrote. I wrote short prose for various literary
reviews and my first book, 'The Cinematography Caravan',
was published in 1985, followed by 'Night Train' in
1989. My books began to be published abroad after 1990.
Who
is your readership in Romania and do you feel that there
is a similar English-speaking readership?
In general, everywhere in the world, there are, I think,
two categories of reader. One comprises those who read
for relaxation, as a pastime while they are travelling
to a destination by train or aeroplane, etc. These are
the readers of romantic, detective or adventure fiction,
unpretentious readers who gulp down books. The second
category is that of well-informed readers, with a solid
culture, who are looking for vision, spirituality and
aesthetic beauty in books. These are the readers that
interest me and from this point of view I don't think
there are great differences between Romanian and English
readers, because they both have the same goal: spiritual
self-enrichment.
Internationally,
not much has been published or is known about Romanian
writing. How would you describe your writing to an English
speaking audience, would this audience need an understanding
of Romanian culture to appreciate the finer points within
the text?
Yes,
unfortunately, that's true: very few Romanian writers
are very well known abroad, and I can only congratulate
Plymouth University Press on this salutary initiative
of promoting our literature in the English-speaking
world. Of course, it would be ideal for the English
reading public to know as much as possible about our
specific national culture; but given that this has not
happened up to now, all I can do is to hope that the
subjects, themes and styles of Romanian writers will
stir sufficient interest, because ultimately the major
themes of any literature are always the same, but with
infinite variations. As far as I am concerned, if I
were to find a common denominator for my prose pieces,
it would be the relationship between the fictional and
the real, the way in which they interact, be it a question
of political fiction (about communism), as in 'The Cinematography
Caravan', or of literary fiction, as in 'The Island',
or quasi-fantastic fiction, as in 'Night Train'. This
relationship between fiction and reality still obsesses
me even today.
Which
Romanian writers have influenced you the most? Are there
any English writers who have had a similar influence
upon you?
Like all the writers of my generation, I was enormously
influenced by the satirical vision of our great late
nineteenth-century satirist Ion Luca Caragiale. If,
as is said, classic Russian prose emerged from beneath
Gogol' 'overcoat”, then it can equally be
said that a large part of Romanian literature emerged
from under Caragiale's hat. Also along satirical lines,
I then had the revelation of the fascinating worlds
created by Swift, to whom I would dedicate - were it
not an impiety - my collection of SF parodies, Planet
of the Mediocrities. I also admire the sadness that
floats like a metaphysical mist over certain matchless
pages of Virginia Woolf and the extraordinary epic endeavour
of James Joyce's Ulysses, which Virginia Woolf - if
I remember rightly - called 'a memorable failure”.
But the writer who influenced me most in my youth was
William Faulkner. For years on end I was unable to escape
the influence of his type of sentence development, which
seemed to me to be able to cover any situation. The
Sound and the Fury was for a very long time my favourite
book.
As
a Romanian, have your personal experiences of communism
influenced your writing? In particular, how has a democratic
regime influenced your work? What are the biggest challenges
that you face as a Romanian writer, and with Romania
now an EU member what changes do you look forward to
seeing?
Romanian communism was a terrible experience, especially
its beginning (prison camps, gaols, the extermination
of intellectuals and the wealthier peasants, Orwellian
production co-operatives, and so on) and its end, in
the 1980s (cold, hunger, queues for almost every kind
of foodstuff). In my childhood and adolescence, in the
so-called period of liberalisation under Ceausescu (between
1966 and 1975), there was to a certain extent an ideological
thaw, and it was then that translations from Western
philosophy and literature, which had been banned up
until then, began to be published, and so I took advantage
of this as much as I could. When the screws were tightened
once more, it was too late for communism to change me
or my peers - we were already imbued with western values.
Communism was like diabetes in a way: you treated it
with the insulin of reading, pirate videos, and so on.
It didn't matter, for example, that there used to be
frequent power cuts: we used to read and write - if
you will forgive the comparison - like Shakespeare,
by candlelight. As for Romania's endless period of transition
toward democratic and market economy values, I'm too
caught up in the middle of it to be able to stand back
and judge it.
One
of the first books to be published in 2009 as part of
the 20 Romanian Writers series is 'The Cinematography
Caravan'. How did the book come about and what was the
most difficult aspect of selecting stories for this
book? What is the thread that holds them together?
'The Cinematography Caravan' came into being gradually,
as a result of accumulated experiences of life and above
all my reading experiences, because I think that currently
literature is created more from books than from what
we call 'life'. It always amuses me when someone says,
'Oh, what a life I've led! If I wrote it down, what
a novel it would make!' I can guarantee you it wouldn't
make any novel at all. I was too young to have any clear
memory of the 1950s, the cruellest decade of Stalinist
communism (the subject of 'The Cinematography Caravan'),
but from reading and the stories of my grandparents
and parents, I was able to imagine - constructively,
I hope - what happened back then. What connects the
stories in the book is precisely the relationship I
was talking about earlier: fiction and reality.
What
would you say has been your most significant achievement
as a Romanian writer?
The novellas 'Night Train' and 'The Adolescent'.
What
new publishing projects do you have lined up and when
can we expect to see them published?
I'm working on a novel which will be called 'A Man from
the East'. |
