Writing about Romania - part II novels

It’s important to recognise the various genres which can be used to try to penetrate the soul of a country. Travelogues may be the easiest but there are also

• novels;
• histories;
• social and cultural histories (including jokes);
• memoirs and diaries;

which I will cover in this series of posts. The other important genres are

• caricatures and paintings (most Romanian painters produced marvellous line drawings)
• films
• plays eg Ion Caragiale 
• photographs eg Andrei Pandele’s secretive shots of the 1980s 

to which I will try to do justice in 2014.

Novellists can presumably give fuller vent to their imagination than other categories of writers and 

Miklos Banffy’s Writing on the wall – The Transylvanian Trilogy gave us a wonderful picture of the privileged slice of Transylvanians living in the first couple of decades of the 20^th century  .

Banffy’s trilogy was originally published in Hungarian in the 1930s and has taken all of 75 years to become appreciated in the English-speaking world as the literary masterpiece it is  - the three books are

• They Were Counted 
• They Were Found Wanting ; and
• They Were Divided 

Gregor von Rezzori is one of the most neglected of writers from this area which has been variously part of Austro-Hungary, Romania and now Ukraine.

An Ermine in Czernopol (1958) ostensibly centred on the curious tragicomic fate of an Austrian officer of supreme ineffectuality gathers a host of unlikely characters and their unlikelier stories by way of engaging the reader in a kaleidoscopic experience of a city where nothing is as it appears-a city of discordant voices, of wild ugliness and sometimes heartbreaking disappointment. Rezzori "summons the disorderly and unpredictable energies of a town where everything in the world is seemingly mixed up together, a multicultural society that existed long before the idea of multiculturalism". This book is effectivelt part of a trilogy - with the other two books appearing in the "memoir" section which follows.

Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy is rather now overshadowed by Banffy’s magnum opus. The first part of Manning’s trilogy focuses on life in Bucharest at the commencement of the Second World War   and was produced in Britain in the early 1960s

Novels by Romanian authors focusing on Romania which are worthy of mention include -

• Norman Manea's "Compulsory Happiness" (published in 2012 – but written in the 1980s)
• Mircea Carterescu Nostalgia (2005 in English – 1993 Romanian) and Blinding
• Nobel prize- winner (but oh so depressive!) Hertha Mueller 
• Domnica Radulescu's rather lighter Train to Trieste (2009) 

If you want to know more about Romanian writers - then there's a good list of 100 contemporary writers here (although the most famous - Carterescu - is missing!!); and an excellent book Romanian writers on writing (2011) edited by Norman Manea. The link will give you the list of another 100 more classic writers.  

Foreign novelists’ works using Bucharest as a location include -

• Dean’s December; Saul Bellow (1982) 
• Rates of Exchange by Malcolm Bradbury (1982)  
• The Long Shadows; Alan Brownjohn (1999)
• Uncle Rudolf by Paul Bailey (2002) 
• The Last hundred Days; Patrick McGuinnes (2011) 
• Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding (2012) 

update; I’ve since come across this ten-page bibliography on writing about....Transylvania 

Travelogues - about Romania

Romania is a large country – but remote - several days of driving are required before travellers from northern Europe will reach Bucharest in its south. Hardly surprising therefore some have chosen to walk or cycle!

I have identified at least a dozen Travelogues for this first part of a series about books about Romania -

The most famous was Patrick Leigh Fermour whose trilogy of his walk from the English Channel to Istanbul in the 1930s was finished only this year.

• A Time of Gifts (1977) covered mainly his experience of Nazi Germany;
• Between the Woods and the Water (1986) of Hungarian aristocratic houses in Transylvania; and, after a 25-year gap,
• The Broken Road (2013) dealt mainly with the Bulgarian and Greek sections of his trip.

A few years later Sacharverwell Sitwell used motorised transport and gave us Romanian Journey (1938) 

In 1999 Alan Ogden published “Romania Revisited – on the trail of English travellers 1602-1941” but the same author also edited an Englishman’s description of Romanian villages in the 1930s – “Romanian Furrow - Colourful Experiences of Village Life”; Donald Hall (Author) and Alan Ogden (Editor) (2007). Sadly neither of these books are currently available.

“Stealing from a deep place” by Brian Hall (1985) recounts experiences touring by bicycle through Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, a two-year trip (1982-1984) made possible by a travel fellowship. "He focuses", the blurb tells us, "on the political milieu which has led to food shortages and inadequate housing for a growing proportion of the population. Among the private citizens of the countries visited, he found great warmth and curiosity coexisting with an avarice and mistrust brought about by necessity".

Clearly travel was easier after 1989 – although only 4 books seem to cover the 1990s -

• In another Europe - a journey to Romania Georgina Harding (1990) - see also part 2 of this post (novels)
• Transylvania and Beyond; another bicycle trip, this time by the indefatigable and great Irish writer, Dervla Murphy (1992) 
• Looking for Gheorge; Love and Death in Romania; by Helena Drysdale (1992) 
• Clear Waters Arising by Nicolas Crane (1997)  was actually a walk over the mountains which stretch from Spain to Romania.

The last few years have seen a little more interest –

• Moons and Aurochs; a Romanian Journey; Alan Ogden (2007) is impossible to find
• Along the Enchanted Way by William Blacker (2010) an upper-class Englishmen who chose to live first in Maramures and then in Transylvania for a few years, conducting a couple (admitted) of love affairs with gypsies in the course of the latter - but writing beautifully before disappearing to Italian and English country houses
• To Romania, with Love  by Tessa Dunlop (2012) perhaps belongs better to the memoir section which will follow shortly
• Never Mind the Balkans – here’s Romania by Mike Ormsby (2012) is difficult to categorise - amusing sketches of contemporary life in Romania written by an ex-pat
• The way of the Crosses; Peter Hurley (2013) is a genuine traveller's tale which I wrote about in my previous post

Kindness in Romania

One man who met with great kindness here was Irishman Peter Hurley who made a snowy pilgrimage from Sapanta on the border with Ukraine arriving in mid December last year in Bucharest, overnighting mostly in village houses on the rural tracks he was using.

I was prepared to dislike the book he has just published on his journey - as another example of outsiders imposing themselves on unsuspecting locals - noting that a quick flick indicated that there was no mention of other books written about the country. 

But Hurley is not your typical expat – resident in the country for almost 20 years and developing a variety of musical and rural networks from his work some of whom are tapped for hospitality. Most of his overnight stays, however, are made in houses he chances upon late in the evenings as he finishes his daily treks and whose impecunious residents clearly take to this eccentric visitor. His vignettes, with a different pen, might have been found intrusive but Hurley's help create a gallery of highly sympathetic portraits of people living off God's land.... 

The book’s descriptions of the landscape make it a charming read and it contains several positive stories of (sadly rare) cooperative work in some villages for the production of milk and apple juice; of those practising craft skills which are (also sadly) disappearing; and of at least one good priest doing (very) good work (interestingly in Cristian near my own village).  
The book is entitled The Way of the Crosses - from the habit he adopted of prayer at the small roadside crosses (troite) he meets on his way. He says early on that he does not consider himself a religious person but he certainly seems to have made amends during his journey! As an agnostic myself, I might have found this note jarring - but the author's basic goodness rescues that and clearly inspires those he met. We can do with more of this in our lives!

The book has spurred me to make a list of the books I know of in English about Romania. A year back I had posted about good guides to the country and referred to a list I had found in one website . And, in 20102, I also did a guide to blogs about Romania. 

But I know of only one (short) list of books which have Romania as their focus – whether novels, histories or whatever and that is in the blog Bucharest Life - although John Villier's "Romania" (Pallas Guide) had almost 100 book references (mainly histories) 

So thank you Peter for inspiring me to make what is probably the first real attempt at such a list of books in English about Romania. Currently it has 35 books on it - novels, travelogues, memoirs and histories.

Law-breaking in Romania

One of the few signs of public kindness left in Romania is.... hitch-hiking. At the exit of all cities you can see a few people waiting for lifts – which they will generally get in 10 minutes or so. As you leave the car – after a trip of 50 kilometres say – you will simply put a note worth a couple of euros in the driver’s hand as you leave. But hitch-hiking in Romania is being banned – with the guilty party now designated as the driver (as if we were the customers of prostitutes). 

So where does that place me when I am on the 6 kilometre stretch of track from the main road to the village where I live in the summer when I encounter villagers? No justification has been given for this stupid new law which, hopefully, will be ignored by all, not least the police (as it was for a previous effort some years back apparently). As if Romanians were not being crushed enough!

I referred some months back to a great book of black and white photographs of Ceaucescu‘s Romania by Andrei Pandele  which got a nice review on the BBC magazine. 

The author of the piece, Tessa Dunlop, wrote a novel recently about the period – To Romania with Love 

Finally, for those who want to know more about aspects of Romania’s history, there is an interesting review of the second-world war dictator Antonescu here

Ideas and Institutions

The last section of de Botton’s book deals with institutions and has a few simple but effective graphs comparing the scale of annual spending  eg (a) of the Catholic Church with that of Proctor and Gambles; and (b) of Pringle crisps in UK with that for all books and poetry published in that country! These graphs really make the point very powerfully about the impossibility of individual writers making any impact on national affairs. The text then offers the following sentence -

The challenge we face is how to ally the very many good ideas which currently slumber in the recesses of intellectual life with organisational tools (many religious in nature) which stand the best chance of giving these ideas due impact in the world (p299)

De Botton’s book is one of those rare ones which emerge from my reading with a mass of underlining, pencilled strokes, ticks and just a few question marks. It helped remind me of various issues which have cropped up from time to time in the blogs over the past few years but to which I have not devoted enough consideration, such as -

• How we can reinvent the ethic of social responsibility
• The need to honour those individuals who embody the “good life”
• How the discontent if not rage so many people have about the commercial, political and financial elites can be translated into effective social action.  
• The importance (but marginalisation) of cross-boundary (inter-disciplinary) work and writing 
• the neglect (and importance of) literature and history in giving insights to contemporary issues

Against technocracy

We talk loosely about the moral emptiness of the modern world – perhaps particularly at this time of year when consumerism is so much in our faces. “Me-me” has become the central driving force and egocentricity the name of the only game in town. An increasing question for many of my generation is how to develop a coherent set of stories and messages capable of persuading our societies of the need to change track – and in what way? To some of us it seems that a rediscovery of the ethic of social responsibility is an important part of the answer. But our educational institutions seem unable to deal with values

 We are by nature, says de Botton in Religion for Atheists, "fragile and capricious - beset by fantasies of omnipotence, worlds away from being able to command even a modicum of the good sense and calm that secular education takes as the starting point for its own pedagogy". However, he continues -

...ideas need not just to be presented, but also repeated. The Christian calendar does this, as does the set daily liturgy.
Secular society, on the other hand, leaves us free - presenting us with a constant stream of new information, and prompting us to forget the lot. It expects us to spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us, and gives us weekends off for consumption and recreation. It’s the ‘news’ which occupies the position of authority in the secular sphere which the liturgical calendar has in the religious one. Matins become the breakfast bulletin, vespers the evening report. Its prestige is founded on the assumptions that our lives are poised on the verge of transformation due to the 2 driving forces of modern history: politics and technology. Religious texts, by contrast, are written on stone, books are few and thoroughly absorbed.We are familiar enough with the major categories of the humanities as they are taught in secular universities – history and anthropology, literature and philosophy - as well as with the sorts of examination questions they produce: Who were the Carolingians? Where did phenomenology originate? What did Emerson want? We know too that this scheme leaves the emotional aspects of our characters to develop spontaneously, or at the very least in private, perhaps when we are with our families or out on solitary walks in the countryside.

In contrast, Christianity concerns itself from the outset with the inner confused side of us, declaring that we are none of us born knowing how to live; Christianity is focused on helping a part of us that secular language struggles even to name, which is not precisely intelligence or emotion, not character or personality, but another, even more abstract entity loosely connected with all of those and yet differentiated from them by an additional ethical and transcendent dimension - and to which we may as well refer, following Christian terminology, as the soul. It has been the essential task of the Christian pedagogic machine to nurture, reassure, comfort and guide our souls. p112-13

I rarely miss an opportunity to castigate the modern university for its ever-increasing compartmentalisation of knowledge and marginalisation, indeed stigmatisation, of inter-disciplinary work. If ever an occupation deserved the accusation of insidious conduct of the “trahison des clercs” it is the modern academic – in their ivory towers and, with a few honourable exceptions, being indifferent to the fate of humanity. As de Botton puts it -

The modern university appears to have little interest in teaching emotional or ethical life skills, much less how to love their neighbours and leave the world happier than they found it. Scripture used to do this; and since the C19th the hope has been that culture could replace scripture in helping people find meaning, understand themselves, behave morally, forgive others and confront their own mortality. So we could turn to Marcus Aurelius, Boccaccio, Wagner and Turner instead. It’s an odd proposition – but maybe not so much absurd as unfamiliar. Novels do impart moral instruction; paintings do make suggestions about happiness; literature can change our lives, philosophy can offer consolations.But while universities have achieved unparalleled expertise in imparting factual info about culture, they remain uninterested in training students to use it as a repertoire of wisdom. ‘So opposed have many atheists been to the content of religious belief that they have omitted to appreciate its inspiring and still valid overall object: to provide us with well-structured advice on how to lead our lives.’ (page 111).

Christianity meanwhile looks at the purpose of education from another angle, because it has an entirely different concept of human nature. It has no patience with theories that dwell on our independence or our maturity. It instead believes us to be at heart desperate, fragile, vulnerable, sinful creatures, a good deal less wise than we are knowledgeable, always on the verge of anxiety, tortured by our relationships, terrified of death - and most of all in need of God.

John Wesley used to preach on being kind, staying obedient to parents, visiting the sick, caution against bigotry. He said ‘I design plain truth for plain people: therefore… I abstain from all nice and philosophical speculations; from all perplexed and intricate reasonings; and as far as possible, from even the show of learning. My design is… to forget all that ever I have read in my life.’ (page 120). 

‘We on the other hand have constructed an intellectual world whose most celebrated institutions rarely consent to ask, let alone answer, the most serious questions of the soul.’ (p 121) Maybe we need a new kind of university, one which had a dept for relationships, an institute of dying and a centre for self knowledge.Then there’s the method – impassioned preaching makes a difference to the engagement and impact. ‘Secular education will never succeed in reaching its potential until humanities lecturers are sent to be trained by African-American Pentecostal preachers.’ (p131). Summary: Religions teach wisdom; secular societies offer information.

This was a good post - exactly two years ago - on some lessons from trying to build the capacity of democratic institutions in transition countries

Rediscovering civic bonds?

I missed the Romanian Book Fair of November but there is currently a small Christmas book fair for a week in the Peasant Museum nearby - where I picked up a copy of Alain De Botton’s most recent book – Religion for Atheists (2012) - also Orhan Pamuk’s early Silent House; and 2 translations into Romanian (Louis de Bernieres’s Captain’s Corot’s Mandolin; and de Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy) (2000)

Critics tend to take a condescending view of de Botton (inasmuch as they bother with him at all) which says a lot about them. I’m half way into his book and find it one of the most interesting non-fiction books I’ve read this year ...And what a charming and well-written book compared with the hard, unforgiving stuff which comes from atheists (I've always counted myself an agnostic). 
Parts of it remind me of Theodor Zeldin’s Intimate History of Humanity (copies of which I used to give to people); and other parts of The CharacterStrengths and Virtues Handbook edited a decade ago by Martin Seligman

The first link to the book gives a positive review which captures the appeal of the book rather nicely -

....throughout the book he identifies areas where he believes secular society fails to provide community or help people cope with challenges in their lives, and points to religious practices and institutions which nonreligious people might wish to appropriate to fill the gap. Indeed, de Botton’s approach to religion seems fueled by a profound disenchantment with modern secular society, which he views as impoverished by the loss of practices and modes of thought that religion colonized.

“The challenge facing atheists,” de Botton claims, “is how to reverse the process of religious colonization: how to separate ideas and rituals from the religious institutions which have laid claim to them but don’t truly own them.” Religion offers “well-structured advice on how to lead our lives,” which de Botton contends the secular world often fails to provide. The challenge for modern atheists is to offer such structure (and rituals) in a non-religious way.

De Botton examines ten areas in which valuable insights may be derived from religious practices, and gives numerous creative suggestions as to how the secular world might reclaim them eg

• Noting how religions use food to bring strangers together in a structured way, he offers the “Agape Restaurant,” in which diners will be encouraged to meet new people and share aspects of their inner lives.

• He notices that religious values and even consumer products, harnessing the arts and music, are branded and promoted far more passionately and effectively than secular values, which raises powerful questions regarding how well humanists are spreading their ideas.

• He proposes that university lecturers might be trained to present their ideas as passionately and dramatically as Pentecostal preachers — a proposal that this graduate student (and veteran of countless dreary lectures) finds delightfully provocative (if somewhat absurd).

The very format of the book is an example of the approach De Botton is trying to encourage - at least every fourth page consists of a black and white photograph (here it reminds me of the wonderful A Fortunate Man (1967) by John Berger and Jean Mohr). 
In combination with the clarity and beauty of the text and the double spacing, this makes the book highly accessible!
And this more extended assessment also summarises the argument well -

We are seldom encouraged officially to be nice to one another. It offends our libertarian beliefs and risks paternalism. JS Mill said the only grounds for state interference in people’s lives is to prevent them harming others – not for their own good. Religions however have never held back. Libertarians doubt we can know what virtue is, or how to instil it in others – they have no moral bedrock. The only exception is childrearing, where parents do favour intervention over neutrality in their desire to bring up their children. And yet the results are not good – freedom does not always bring only good things; ‘our deepest wish may be that someone would come along and save us from ourselves.’

Religions however do offer guidance on how to live. They know that to sustain goodness we need an audience – it helps to know someone is watching (most marriages would work better if we thought that!). Clergy may tend to speak as if they alone were in possession of maturity and moral authority – but Christianity acknowledges that we are actually all infantile, incomplete and unfinished – and calls it Original Sin. It creates a moral atmosphere in which people point out their flaws to one another and look for improvement in their behaviour. Fresco painters put up virtues and vices as models and warnings – eg Scrovegni Chapel.

 What would it be like if we had similar images on advertising hoardings – eg advocating Forgiveness?Atheists tend to pity the inhabitants of religiously dominated societies for the extent of the propaganda they have to endure, but this is to overlook secular societies' equally powerful and continuous calls to prayer.

A libertarian state truly worthy of the name would try to redress the balance of messages that reach its citizens away from the merely commercial and towards a holistic conception of flourishing.

True to the ambitions of Giotto's frescoes, these new messages would render vivid to us the many noble ways of behaving that we currently admire so much and so blithely ignore… We don't only need reminders of the advantages of savoury snacks. p88 

This post about the "10 essential virtues" gives a good summary of what "secular" as distinct from "religious" or "commercial" values mean. In my next post I will give excerpts about the book's key chapter on Education... 

The moral depravity of the Romanian political class - continued

The political class in Romania surpassed itself last week. Without any warning or discussion they passed a draft law to protect themselves against prosecution for corruption. Under the proposed law, the president, members of parliament, and lawyers would no longer be classed as public officials, thus protecting them from charges of abuse of office, bribe-taking, conflict of interest, and other corruption crimes, Officials who have been convicted of such crimes may be exonerated if the bill becomes law.

 The bill has not yet been sent for President Basescu’s signature. He can return the bill for revision only once.

Prime Minister Victor Ponta – on his return from Nelson Mandela’s funeral -  seemed to accept on 12 December that the law needed to be discussed again, and if it is endorsed by legal experts, that Romania should ask the European Commission to say whether it breaks any of the country’s international obligations.

The anti-corruption agency DNA says 28 parliamentarians are on trial or serving prison sentences for corruption and more than 100 mayors and deputy mayors are on trial for financial crimes. The bill sharply contradicts Romania’s obligations under European and UN anti-corruption agreements, the DNA said.

One frequent blogger on things Romanian sets the scene and gives further detail here