Dan Lungu
Encyclopedia
Dan Lungu is a Romania
n novelist, short story writer, poet and dramatist, also known as a literary theorist and sociologist. The recipient of critical acclaim for his short story volume Cheta la flegmă ("Quest for Phlegm") and his
novels Raiul găinilor ("Chicken Paradise") and Sînt o babă comunistă! ("I'm a Communist Biddy!"), he is also one of the most successful authors to have emerged in post-1990 Romanian literature
. Lungu's literary universe, which mainly comprises "microsocial
" images of life under the communist regime
and during the subsequent transitional period
, bridges a form of Neorealism
with Postmodernism
. Often included among a group of authors who signed their first major contracts with Polirom
publishing house, he is also seen as a distinctive voice from his adoptive provincial city of Iaşi
.
A lecturer at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Iaşi, and former editor in chief of Timpul
newspaper, Dan Lungu is also the noted author and co-author of essays and sociological research into everyday life under communist rule, scientific preoccupations which share similarities with his work in fiction. His main interests in the area of historical research include the feminine experience of totalitarian
rule, the connection between official propaganda
and the actual lives of working class
members, and the development of cultural attitudes in relation to communist censorship
.
city into a Romanian Orthodox
family, Lungu has been described as one of the decreţei
, or children of the baby boom
imposed by the communist ban on abortion
. He completed his education in Iaşi
, at the local university's Sociology Department, while pursuing interests in track and field, as well as Go. Having received his Ph. D. with a thesis on identity formation
, he later pursued postdoctoral studies at the University of Paris
.
Lungu developed a passion for writing from a young age, but debuted in literature only in the early 1990s. In 1996, he and several other Iaşi-based authors founded the literary society Club 8, and he consequently came to be seen as its main theorist. Among those who frequented the circle during the following years were authors of various schools, such as Constantin Acosmei, Şerban Alexandru, Radu Andriescu, Michael Astner, Emil Brumaru
, Mariana Codruţ
, Gabriel Horaţiu Decuble, Radu Pavel Gheo, Florin Lăzărescu, Ovidiu Nimigean, Antonio Patraş, Dan Sociu
and Lucian Dan Teodorovici
.
The first volume bearing Lungu's signature saw print with Editura Junimea in 1996: a poetry collection, it carried the title Muchii ("Edges"). His stories, including Buldozeristul ("The Bulldozer Operator"), winner of the Editura Nemira prize for 1997, saw print in various venues during the late 1990s. Lungu also debuted as a dramatist, his work being included in two anthologies of young Romanian theater. The first among these writings is the 1995 Lecţie. Sau ceva de genul acesta ("A Lesson. Or Something like That"), first performed in 2002 by Bucharest's Green Hours fringe theater under the name of Cu cuţitul la os ("A Knife Cut to the Bone"); the second such text, published in 1996, was called Vinovatul să facă un pas înainte ("Will the Guilty Man Take One Step Forward"). Having made his editorial debut in short story with the 1999 collection Cheta la flegmă, he regularly published new works of fiction and cultural analysis over the following years. Between 2001 and 2002, he took over as editor in chief of Timpul.
In 2003, Lungu published three books of essays on literary theory and microsociology
, titled respectively Povestirile vieţii. Teorie şi documente ("Life Stories. Theories and Documents"), Construcţia identităţii într-o societate totalitară. O cercetare sociologică asupra scriitorilor ("The Construction of Identity in a Totalitarian Society. A Sociological Study on Writers") and Cartografii în tranziţie. Eseuri de sociologia artei şi literaturii ("Transitional Cartographies. Essays of Art and Literary Sociology"). Also that year came a second work in drama, Nuntă la parter ("Wedding on the Ground Floor"), and a reprint of Cheta la flegmă under the title of Proză cu amănuntul ("Retail Prose"), which also featured a dossier of critical commentary from all sides of the literary scene and an account of his visit to Transnistria
, a breakaway region of Romania's neighbor Moldova
, governed as an unrecognized state. They were followed in 2004 by the novel Raiul găinilor. A second volume of short stories, titled Băieţi de gaşcă (Romanian
for both "Boys in a Gang" and "Good Fellows"), saw print in 2005. After joining fellow Club 8 member Gheo in authoring a study of social history
and microsociology, investigating impact of communist rule
on Romanian women, published in 2008 as Tovarăşe de drum. Experienţa feminină în comunism ("Female Fellow Travelers. Female Experience under Communism"), Lungu returned to fiction with the 2009 novel Cum să uiţi o femeie ("How to Forget a Woman").
A resident of Iaşi, Dan Lungu is married and the father of two. One of the first authors from the post-Revolution period
to collect a steady profit from literary contributions, he invested his money into a chalet
on the outskirts of Iaşi. He visited France in 2005, invited by the Belles Etrangères cultural exchange program, and, in 2007, returned as a Writer-in-Residence at the Villa Mont Noir, Marguerite Yourcenar
's birthplace. He was twice nominated for the European Commission
's Jean Monnet Award for Literature
in 2008. The target of much public interest, Sînt o babă comunistă! was considered for a film adaptation by Romanian director Stere Gulea
.
As of 2009, Lungu's work had been translated into nine languages, including a critically acclaimed French-language version of Raiul găinilor (Le paradis des poules, Éditions Jacqueline Chambon, 2005). In its Spanish
translation, published in 2009, Sînt o babă comunistă! was included by El País daily in a "best of" chart for humorous literature. Also in 2009, a chart compiled by the satirical and lifestyle magazine Academia Caţavencu
ranked Lungu 46th among the "50 sexiest Romanian intellectuals".
. Within the Polirom collection, which primarily comprises autofiction
al works, Lungu's contribution is judged by critic Bianca Burţa-Cernat to have been among the "good/interesting/well-written" category. She believes him to be of the same rank as Cezar Paul-Bădescu, Victoria Comnea, Radu Pavel Gheo, Ana Maria Sandu, Cecilia Ştefănescu and Lucian Dan Teodorovici
, but below the "very good" category of Petre Barbu, T. O. Bobe
, Filip Florian, Florin Lăzărescu, Sorin Stoica and Bogdan Suceavă.
The authentic streak of Lungu's narratives was highlighted by Mihaela Ursa, a literary reviewer for Apostrof
magazine, who claimed: "With Dan Lungu, and not just with him, our literature seems to have fortunately parted with the complexes of the genius and that of the masterpiece, moving back closer to the reader." Poet and critic Octavian Soviany notes: "Dan Lungu refuses [...] the monarchic perspective of the demiurge
-novelist who always gazes on the world from above [...], for he treats his characters 'from one equal to another', places himself among them, advancing a vision 'from within' which confers upon the narrative some extra authenticity and naturalness." Also according to Soviany, Dan Lungu's prose is connected to "the great Balzacian
tradition" and "the masters of the verist
short story". Similarly, literary critic Daniel Cristea-Enache argues that Lungu is separated from his generation by the understanding that prose is "in large measure written not for oneself, but for another. For others, the more of them the better." Researcher Cristina Chevereşan sees a special link between the works of Lungu, Florian and Stoica, "epics of life lived in the often suffocating circle of a collectivity as scanty and organically welded as it is oppressive".
In its immediate Romanian context, Lungu's work has occasionally been ranked among "recovery literature" pieces—diverse works which, in the post-censorship
era, provide retrospective testimonies or analytical overviews of the communist period. This classification, which places Lungu alongside Petru Cimpoeşu and Ion Manolescu, is, according to critic Cosmin Ciotloş, exaggerated and simplistic: "Personally, I am rather skeptic toward any sort of necessity that is imposed or predictable." Another particularity of Lungu's work involves his local affiliation, connected with the culture of Iaşi city and the historical region
of Moldavia
. Cernat, who noted that Lungu has a preference for publishing his work with Iaşi-based venues, deduced "the strategy of asserting a personal project with several levels, which assigns a certain place to a 'Moldavian' (Iaşian) identity". Reportedly, Lungu refused several offers to move into Bucharest
, Romania's capital, to which he prefers his adoptive Iaşi.
deemed "microsocial
"—that is, primarily concerned with everyday subjects and simple interactions between individuals. His main influences include foreign authors Peter Handke
, Michel Houellebecq
and Elfriede Jelinek
, while his imagery has drawn comparisons with the films of Yugoslavian
-born director Emir Kusturica
. Lungu has also become one of the Romanian authors best-known outside Romania, and, according to literary critic Marius Chivu, one in the rare position of being recommended to a local public with quotes from foreign critics. This notoriety, coupled with the candor of his accounts, has reputedly sparked criticism that Lungu is "ruining Romania's image abroad", which prompted Lungu to state: "I am not a Foreign Ministry employee."
At the same time, Dan Lungu's literary contributions adopt a number of traits which have been defined as Postmodern
. These aspects include Lungu's parodic
take on cliché
s and commonplace ideas, a process which, according to Ursa, results in "cultural short-circuits". His prose is also placed in connection to the debates surrounding the Postmodern nature of the Optzecişti, writers who debuted a decade before Lungu, but whose contribution is seen as influential on the young literary scene. Lungu is a successor to the Neorealist group among the Optzecişti, and seen by Moldovan literary critic Iulian Ciocan as less indebted to "the Postmodern paradigm
". Writing in 2000, Ciocan argued: "Dan Lungu's debut is remarkable because the young writer does not frantically embrace the Postmodern technique and ontology
, but uses them only to the measure where they lend more authenticity to his prose." A similar point is made by Cristian Teodorescu, himself one of the Optzecişti, who parallels Lungu's storytelling techniques with those developed before 1989 by Mircea Nedelciu
. Commenting on Lungu's relation to a larger historical and stylistic context, Burţa-Cernat wrote: "the prose writers of the newer category, the 'social anthropologists
', do not aim to reinvent the world by capturing it within fabulous scenarios, but merely to describe it. They operate with a lens, a microscope [...], avid for describing its textures and the most anodyne of its details." This "minimalist
" tendency, she noted, falls in line with 1980 authors—Nedelciu, Teodorescu, Sorin Preda, Ioan Groşan—, and also includes Lungu's colleagues Stoica, Teodorovici, Radu Aldulescu, Andrei Bodiu
and Călin Torsan. A distinct view is held by Cristea-Enache, who views Dan Lungu as one of the authors who parted with both "the endless ironical games" of the 1980 generation and the "harshness of 1990s naturalism
", while avoiding "aesthetic compromise".
According to literary chronicler Bogdan Creţu, a "coherently voiced program" is observable throughout Lungu's work in fiction, and is encapsulated into Lungu's own reference to "retail prose". Dan Lungu acknowledges that his main literary works tend to center each on a particular narrative technique, but recounts that the substance for this technique is only apparent to himself a posteriori. The subtle connection between Lungu's sociological research and his fiction writings has also been discussed by critics Andrei Terian and Paul Cernat. The latter notes: "Dan Lungu is a professional who does not mix his levels: the areas are firmly separated, even if they communicate on the deep level of the overall project."
operator, an asylum custodian, a thief, a group of soldiers, a child and an unhappy couple. According to critic and journalist Costi Rogozanu: "Under a 'strong' title, Dan Lungu collects the most diverse of prose pieces, some written in the most direct argot
ic language, others including the most meticulous of traditional lines. [...] The Iaşi-based writer sets to clearly delimit his area of interest—daily life in the post-Revolution period—, varying with irony the types of writing he uses." The shock value of the title was also noted by Cernat, who concluded that its apparent connection to the "miserabilist" tone of more radical Romanian literature was "rather inadequate". An argument of similar substance was provided by Cristea-Enache. In his view, the stories are "finely written" portraits of people caught in the "post-communist
transition", to the "stark setting of 'tower block
life' which nevertheless almost completely lacks—bizarrely—the 'consumerist
' and pop ingredients of post-communist kitsch
."
Ciocan interprets the work's overall perspective as: "Life is a spectacle both tragic and comical [...], into which 'things great and small' are undiscernably mixed together." According to the same critic, a common trait of the characters is their inability of discerning the human condition
: "The maximum they are capable of is having the revelation that 'today you are healthy, strong, drinking like a calf and subject to no harm, and tomorrow bam! the finger points! 'You die!', and you die just like that.' Egotistic, insolent, hypocritical characters, but also gentle, jovial, depending on the circumstances. They are incredibly authentic, convincing, owing precisely to their being stuck in the morass of everyday." Cernat proposes: "Just like in the works of his junior Sorin Stoica and those of a few others, one senses in these minute 'stories of life' the pleasure of collecting 'mentality samples'." Some of the book's characters have to deal with circumstances that test their limits: in Buldozeristul, the protagonist uses his machine to bury his wife and daughter after failing to speed up procedures for a proper funeral; an old age pensioner who seduces women while queuing for gas cylinder
refills; and, in the eponymous writing, a teenager who is publicly humiliated by having his hands and arms covered in spit.
Commenting on 2008 reprint, Ciotloş argued "a permanently invoked Cheta la flegmă of 1999 has become, four years later, a permanently appreciated Proză cu amănuntul", describing the fragments of reviews collected by Lungu as "unbelievably high". Cernat took a more negative view of the new edition, writing that, while the original stories were still relevant, they "only seems to have been republished in order to complete the author's 'polyvalent' profile". The reportage piece detailing Lungu's trip to Transnistria
notably depicts the preservation of Soviet
and communist symbolism throughout the region, the officially sanctioned imposition of Moldovan Cyrillic even to the point where schoolteachers use it for transliterating French-language texts, and the religious aspects of local sports. According to Ciotloş: "The ideology of the 50s appears to have been frozen here for more than half a century."
The play Nuntă la parter pursues a different path, being structured as an abstract parable
: characters known as the Soldiers, isolated from the outside world, are pushed by a commanding voice into performing sinister and absurd acts, including the so-called "wedding on the ground floor", while vaguer exterior sounds provide samples of communist slogans, chanting and, eventually, violence associated with the Revolution. Cernat, who calls the play Lungu's "most vulnerable" work, cites and agrees with the analysis provided by critic Alina Nelega, according to which the text is "a study of a mechanism, rather than a gallery of characters."
as a path to investigating Romania's communist past, in particular the 1965-1989 regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu
. Paul Cernat commends the work for breaking with the pattern of similar post-1989 recoveries, which mainly focus on interviews with political personalities. In contrast, Lungu's book centers on three study cases from working class
environments—Florentina Ichim, Vasile Ariton and Petre Jurescu—whom the regime took pride in claiming were its support base. Their retrospective images of the era vary significantly, fluctuating between nostalgia and virulent anti-communism
. However, all three witnesses recall having themselves resorted to alternative and illicit mechanisms of survival or self-promotion, in particular theft and political corruption
. In his commentary on the interviews, Lungu concluded that, in some cases, the image of workers' lifestyles as offered by the propaganda
apparatus was real, "contrary to our expectations". He added, to Cernat's agreement: "Overturning that which was officially stated during the epoch is not indicative of the real state of things and only drags us down into another ideology [...]. That is why we have said: back to the facts!" In his review of the book, literary critic Dan C. Mihăilescu resonated with such observations, noting their revelatory aspect: "once confronted with the accounts [...], I convinced myself once and for all that the things which, under Ceauşism, I could still believe united us into a solidarity of suffering, are as false as can be. That is, even though we waited in grueling queues, in the same cold, for the same food rations, an ocean existed between the proletariat
[...] and the intellectuals, between 'base and superstructure
'. We were simply put two worlds, not just figuratively, but also effectively. There was nothing for us to sell and steal, whereas they had access to the circuits of theft, to the web of programmed lawlessness."
With Construcţia identităţii într-o societate totalitară, seen by Cernat as "a study up to the international standards" and a work of "entomological
precision", Dan Lungu focuses on how writers and intellectuals related to ideological pressures, explores in particular the theme of "resistance through culture" (as opposed to outspoken dissidence
). The thesis advanced by Lungu is that Romania's pre-communist authoritarian traditions accompanied Westernization
, and therefore failed to rally the society around the notion of legality. Paraphrasing the author's conclusions, Cernat writes: "The 'voluntarist
and elitist
' projects of emancipation, the intellectuals' paternalistic
Bovarysme
, the destruction of the traditional model of the village and the partial assumption of modern values in the urban environment, the weakness of civil society
have all facilitated adaptation to the Stalinist
and, later, national-communist
models [...]. Hence the duplicity, the lack of solidarity among the 'resisters' within a patriarchal
, mostly rural, country..." Historian Cristian Vasile sees Lungu's study as akin to the contributions of anthropologist Katherine Verdery, in that it defines the writers' individual roles in "the process of transforming society and creating the new man
", while serving as an investigation of social identity
constructs. Vasile quotes the book for its conclusions about the impact of agitprop
, socialist realism
and censorship on Romanian literature
and education
, including a corroboration of the censors' own dissatisfaction with their activity, or the link Lungu establishes between the spread of atheism
and the communist version of science education
. A distinct section of the essay refers to the tradition of Jewish Romanian
literature, and in particular to the Jewish impact on modernist literature
. In his review of the chapter, Cernat discussed the "relevant—if at times exaggerated—conclusions" Lungu draws on minority authors having been pushed by their social marginalization into becoming the cultural avant-garde
. In Cernat's view, Construcţia identităţii... "imposes itself through span, seriousness and an irreproachable professionalism", but suffers from "a savant jargon which limits [its] reception to the circle of specialists."
, and, Terian notes, owes direct inspiration to Hanu Ancuţei, an interwar
volume by the classic Romanian author Mihail Sadoveanu
. While Terian believes Raiul găinilor to be primarily calm and distant, his colleague Mircea Iorgulescu, who prefaced the work, argued: "Under a benign and slow-going appearance, the novel's world is actually terrifying. It lives mechanically, though automatisms
which provide it with a kind of demented functioning, similar to one of the characters, a woman who endlessly knits pullovers without watching her own hands." One fragment which drew critical attention is that in which the humble Milică, who has once been allowed into the house of the reclusive, imposing and envied Colonel, embellishes the account of its luxurious standards in order to captivate his peers. Similarly, the mythomaniacal factory worker Mitu obsesses over his supposed chance encounter with communist leader Ceauşescu. In addition to these topical aspects, the novel fictionalizes professional incompetence, feud
, adultery
and working class drinking culture
. It ultimately deals with the impact of post-Revolution economic transition, reflected in the characters' ambiguous memories of Ponzi scheme
s, or projected in the account of how the closure of non-lucrative factories prevented the employees from continuing to steal industrial materials. According to Andrei Terian, the book is primarily relevant for the way in the "captivating" and "discreet" narrative supports events of marginal importance, with "the absence of any demonstrative intent" for a defining characteristic. Lungu however recounted having written it with "pleasure, a masochistic pleasure".
Writing in 2005, French reviewer Alexandre Fillon argued that Raiul găinilor proved a "hilarious" read, whose plot "says a lot about the Romania of yesterday and of the present." However, he also wrote that the work "did not receive critical unanimity". In contrast, Terian defines the reaction of Romanian reviews as "virtually unanimous adhesion".
, while its attempt to isolate pieces of the everyday creates a link with reportage. This approach to storytelling is likened by Bogdan Creţu with the prose of Alexandru Monciu-Sudinski, while Cristian Teodorescu connects it with J. D. Salinger
's Nine Stories
and the poetry of Emil Brumaru
. Noting the difficulties of this approach, particularly in those stories which explore the marginal areas of Romanian society, Creţu commends Dan Lungu for opting in favor of first-person narrative
s written from within, which allow him to preserve the authenticity of uncultured or ungrammatical speech. In Teodorescu's account, the author "grows so close to his characters that he ends up completely inside their skins. He takes the voice of a little girl shocked by the brutality of family life and the promiscuity of life in a block apartment. Or he turns himself into a gang boy and recounts his experiences in argotic language, which does not shy away from any of the words censored out of the latest Dicţionarul explicativ al limbii române
edition." Daniel Cristea-Enache highlights the individualized use of language and gestures, from the "infantile repetitiousness" characteristic of little girls to the "style of tricky young men", believing these traits to be in line with "the exploitation of orality
" by authors such as Sorin Stoica and Ovidiu Verdeş.
While noting that Lungu's Băieţi de gaşcă stories inherently fail to explore "a more profound vision", Creţu argues: "Dan Lungu [nevertheless] manages to render this shortcoming relative through irresistible comedy: not one of word play
[...], but one of situation
." The volume's eponymous story thus alternates between the apparent seriousness of gang culture and the obstacles they face as individuals, with episodes such as one gang member's frustrations over his girlfriend's nymphomania
. Other sections of the volume strike a different note, and include a fictionalized account the life of a young Englishwoman
who decides to settle in Romania. Focusing on Lungu's ability to surprise his readers, Teodorescu commented: "Once in a while, if one does not want to let himself be conquered by his tricks, one may have reactions of mistrust [...] Dan Lungu anticipates this reaction as well and builds up complicity for what he does, like a prestidigitator who, at the same time as jokingly letting you in on how he has made you believe that he was able to cut himself in two, leads you into the fog of the next trick [...]. Whoever carefully reads Dan Lungu gets a free lesson in the manipulation techniques to which all those who wish to have us convinced of the truth in non-literary fiction will expose us without warning and at times successfully." Cristea-Enache, who praised Băieţi de gaşcă for displaying "natural breathing", "stylistic mobility" and "dexterity", also argued: "When the young prose author will manage to inject more substance into both his stories and novels, we shall have in him a leading exponent of this new-old literature."
s, the volume depicts the disorientation and anguish of Emilia (Mica) Apostoae, an aging woman whose longing for the childhood and youth she spent under the communist regime make her block out negative memories of the period. According to Mihaela Ursa, the novel builds on two "extremely productive" sources, "literature about childhood (fed by the tremor of retrospection) and the literature of 'the innocent' (of picaresque
extraction)." In Soviany's view, the text recalls the works of Moldovan author Vasile Ernu and elements from classic works in Romanian literature (from Ion Creangă
's Childhood Memories
to Marin Preda
's Moromeţii
), while Axinte believes it a synthesis of Lungu's own narrative techniques, seeping into "a kind of discourse objectification that has rarely been frequented in recent times." Ciotloş places stress on the work's reworking of communist stereotype
s. He argues that Emilia Apostoae's early biography, in particular her migration from village to urban center, assimilates a theme from socialist realism ("the prose works produced and expired during the 1950s"), while the aspects of narrative language incorporate the diverse avatars of speech under ideological pressure, from the "parental and always costly discussions" confronting politically appointed supervisors and their nonconformist employees to subversive forms of Romanian humor and the "wooden tongue" of official speeches. Spread out between these fragments of authentic speech are Lungu's own observations, which prompt Ciotloş to argue: "[...] this is where [the novel's] originality can be found, in the rare moments when he decides to intervene. When he blocks out the verbal stream to produce a funny remark, when he stretches a joke over several chapters, when, instead of diacritic
s, he places on the cover a majestic and Soviet five-cornered star
."
The narrative hook
in Sînt o babă comunistă! is provided by Emilia's attempt to define her political convictions, after being questioned by her daughter Alice. The content Emilia finds in juxtaposing communism and the happier moments of her life, peaking into episodes of utopia
nism, are seen as observation-based attempts to characterize an entire generation of Romanians. Emilia's erroneous train of thought becomes apparent in episodes where she recalls her employment at a state-owned factory. Her ideal, Ursa notes, is actually that of an "anti-world", where negative values are made to look positive: "work before the lunch break, so that one could slack off afterward [...], 'creative' solutions for increasing productivity, generalized theft ('there was enough to steal from'), painting fir trees green when a visit by Ceauşescu was due, the presence of a good-natured man who traded in political jokes (the assigned informer, as it would turn out)." The constant movement between "before" and "after", Soviany notes, follow "the pendulum
principle", serving to illustrate Emilia's sense of time and the experience of change as nauseating. The object of the novel, according to the critic, is comparable to the scope of a Bildungsroman
: "[Sînt o babă comunistă!] becomes the book about the female protagonist's transition from the infantile and paradise-like stage [...] toward reflection and doubt, therefore toward maturity." The importance of this transformation to the plot is also discussed by Axinte, who argues that its revelations compensate for the fact that the novel "does not provide anything new (as information and biographical document) for those born and bred under communism." Cosmin Ciotloş sees the manner in which Lungu "tames with candor" the elements of a communist-style biography as "socialist realism redeeming itself on the last stretch of the race", stripped of conventions to become "purebred sociological realism". In Lungu's own definition, the book is built around "the decision process blueprint, where pros and cons confront themselves in the present, while invoking their timely roots."
, Sanda Cordoş, Nora Iuga, Simona Popescu, Iulia Popovici, Doina Ruşti
and Simona Sora. According to Bianca Burţa-Cernat, the study, part of a "war on silence", falls in line with earlier contributions in this field—particularly those of Gabriel Horaţiu Decuble, Doina Jela and Tia Şerbănescu. Marius Chivu also underlines their subject's proximity to Cristian Mungiu's award-winning film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
. The narratives often focus on the presence and use of mundane objects, from Western
contraband
items such as condom
s and fragrance, to monopoly
products of the state economy.
Among the diverse accounts in Tovarăşe de drum, Burţa-Cernat singles out those of Babeţi, who recalls the importance tote bag
s had for her family during two decades of communism, and Bittel, who speaks about the ideal female cook, as "the queen of sarmale
". She is however critical of the fact that such a contribution was initiated by men, arguing that this impinges on its merits: "given the way in which they write here, the ladies invited to partake in this collective project leave the impression that they are striving to fall in line with the rules of a game, [...] to confirm [...] the already consolidated idea about them: the idea of difference—much too essentialist
(and it is biological essentialism that is involved here)—, the idea that [...] they see the world, politics included, different from humanity's masculine majority." As part of this comment, she also argues that the book is excessively indebted to concrete economic aspects which women found especially challenging, whereas the "generically human" intellectual needs are "placed in brackets". Chivu, who saw the work as fluctuating between the seriousness of Ruşti's account and Babeţi's humorous recollection, believed Simona Popescu's contribution, which describes communist experience as "laughing out of pity", to be "the most balanced". In reference to the entire text, and in particular accounts of the ban on abortion
, he argues: "all [its] female authors fundamentally speak about the same thing: the torment of being a woman, between the frustration of having one's intimacy forbidden and the efforts of illicit femininity." Babeţi's account was also viewed with interest by journalist Florentina Ciuverca, who also drew attention to Ruşti's story about how, despite the official campaign against abortion, a doctor preemptively subjected her to curettage
over a case of vaginal bleeding
.
employed by a seedy newspaper, covering the period after his lover Marga decides to leave him unannounced. Lungu, who likens the volume's technique with a Möbius strip
and a "psychological zoom", focuses on his protagonist's subsequent dismay, showing him as both character and narrator, while detailing his series of failed love affairs and his conclusion that Magda had never loved him. A secondary element in the plot recounts Andi's tightening bond with his landlord, the Adventist preacher Set, a process illustrated by dialogues which evolve between proselytism
and compassion. According to Marius Chivu, the relationship between Set and Andi is "the novel's consistent part" and a "tour de force", owing to "the natural manner and the authenticity with which [Lungu] recomposes the missionary and religious message." Chivu concludes: "Set is the actual character in this (elegantly written, but lacking in stylistic pretensions) novel, having, overall, enough pathos for a subject far more delicate than love for a woman, that is the love for one's neighbor. For some readers, this may mean very much." According to critic and writer Ovidiu Şimonca, Cum să uiţi o femeie is "tight, ambitious, inciting", but the story line "is wrapped in too many outside details".
The author himself compared Cum să uiţi o femeie with Sînt o babă comunistă!, noting that it was the first of his works to be completely separated from the memory of communism. He specified feeling "intoxicated" by his earlier themes and having an explicit wish was to create "a one hundred percent romance novel
", arguing: "It was much harder for me to write about the world of Neoprotestantism
than from a feminine perspective." He added having felt "a vague and persistent fear that there were mistakes to be made with each step [of the writing process]", explaining: "This being a setting relatively unknown to me, it was easily conceivable that I could have missed or inadequately placed significant details. I was also obsessed with the fear of not offending, not carelessly hurting the dignity of a religious minority. I did not write these articles so as to vilify the born again, to perpetuate all sort of stereotypes about them, but to understand them and to create a powerful character, as I would hope is the case with presbyter
Set [...]." Lungu also mentioned having learned to discard his own preconceptions about minority religions, and recounted having asked a pastor
to verify the narrative as one from inside the religious phenomenon.
Answering to objections about the lack of focus on the central love affair, he commented: "It is, most of all, a novel about memory: what happens to memory and how it restructures itself after a sentimental fracture in one's biography. Things are not very clear-cut, there is no single narrative in one's resurrecting memory, there is a passage from one zone to another, things are slippery, subtle, nuanced. [...] Memory is like an onion that, when peeled, only grows bigger." He added that the novel could be read as the antithesis
between the daily and the eternal: Andi's place of employment ("the newspaper") and the object of Christian reverence ("the Bible
").
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
n novelist, short story writer, poet and dramatist, also known as a literary theorist and sociologist. The recipient of critical acclaim for his short story volume Cheta la flegmă ("Quest for Phlegm") and his
novels Raiul găinilor ("Chicken Paradise") and Sînt o babă comunistă! ("I'm a Communist Biddy!"), he is also one of the most successful authors to have emerged in post-1990 Romanian literature
Literature of Romania
Romanian literature is literature written by Romanian authors, although the term may also be used to refer to all literature written in the Romanian language.Eugène Ionesco is one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd....
. Lungu's literary universe, which mainly comprises "microsocial
Microsociology
Microsociology is one of the main branches of sociology, concerning the nature of everyday human social interactions and agency on a small scale. Microsociology is based on interpretative analysis rather than statistical or empirical observation, and shares close association with the philosophy of...
" images of life under the communist regime
Communist Romania
Communist Romania was the period in Romanian history when that country was a Soviet-aligned communist state in the Eastern Bloc, with the dominant role of Romanian Communist Party enshrined in its successive constitutions...
and during the subsequent transitional period
History of Romania since 1989
- 1989 revolution :1989 marked the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. A mid-December protest in Timişoara against the eviction of a Hungarian minister grew into a country-wide protest against the Ceauşescu régime, sweeping the dictator from power....
, bridges a form of Neorealism
Neorealism (art)
In art, neorealism was established by the ex-Camden Town Group painters Charles Ginner and Harold Gilman at the beginning of World War I. They set out to explore the spirit of their age through the shapes and colours of daily life...
with Postmodernism
Postmodern literature
The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post–World War II literature and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature.Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact...
. Often included among a group of authors who signed their first major contracts with Polirom
Polirom
Polirom or Editura Polirom is a Romanian publishing house with a tradition of publishing classics of international literature and also various titles in the fields of social sciences, such as psychology, sociology and anthropology. The company was founded in February 1995. The first title...
publishing house, he is also seen as a distinctive voice from his adoptive provincial city of Iaşi
Iasi
Iași is the second most populous city and a municipality in Romania. Located in the historical Moldavia region, Iași has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Romanian social, cultural, academic and artistic life...
.
A lecturer at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Iaşi, and former editor in chief of Timpul
Timpul
Timpul is a newspaper published in Romania, originally published as the official platform of the defunct Conservative Party....
newspaper, Dan Lungu is also the noted author and co-author of essays and sociological research into everyday life under communist rule, scientific preoccupations which share similarities with his work in fiction. His main interests in the area of historical research include the feminine experience of totalitarian
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...
rule, the connection between official propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
and the actual lives of working class
Working class
Working class is a term used in the social sciences and in ordinary conversation to describe those employed in lower tier jobs , often extending to those in unemployment or otherwise possessing below-average incomes...
members, and the development of cultural attitudes in relation to communist censorship
Censorship in Communist Romania
Censorship in Communist Romania was widespread and virtually every published document, be it a newspaper article or a book, had to pass the censor's approval...
.
Biography
Born in BotoşaniBotosani
Botoșani is the capital city of Botoșani County, in northern Moldavia, Romania. Today, it is best known as the birthplace of many celebrated Romanians, including Mihai Eminescu and Nicolae Iorga.- Origin of the name :...
city into a Romanian Orthodox
Romanian Orthodox Church
The Romanian Orthodox Church is an autocephalous Eastern Orthodox church. It is in full communion with other Eastern Orthodox churches, and is ranked seventh in order of precedence. The Primate of the church has the title of Patriarch...
family, Lungu has been described as one of the decreţei
Decreţei
Decreţei are Romanian children born in the 1960s and 70s, shortly after the communist regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu issued Decree 770...
, or children of the baby boom
Baby boom
A baby boom is any period marked by a greatly increased birth rate. This demographic phenomenon is usually ascribed within certain geographical bounds and when the number of annual births exceeds 2 per 100 women...
imposed by the communist ban on abortion
Abortion in Romania
Abortion in Romania is legal during the first 14 weeks of the pregnancy. Abortions during later stages of pregnancy are legal only when the woman's life is at risk...
. He completed his education in Iaşi
Iasi
Iași is the second most populous city and a municipality in Romania. Located in the historical Moldavia region, Iași has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Romanian social, cultural, academic and artistic life...
, at the local university's Sociology Department, while pursuing interests in track and field, as well as Go. Having received his Ph. D. with a thesis on identity formation
Identity formation
Identity formation is the development of the distinct personality of an individual regarded as a persisting entity in a particular stage of life in which individual characteristics are possessed and by which a person is recognised or known . This process defines individuals to others and themselves...
, he later pursued postdoctoral studies at the University of Paris
University of Paris
The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...
.
Lungu developed a passion for writing from a young age, but debuted in literature only in the early 1990s. In 1996, he and several other Iaşi-based authors founded the literary society Club 8, and he consequently came to be seen as its main theorist. Among those who frequented the circle during the following years were authors of various schools, such as Constantin Acosmei, Şerban Alexandru, Radu Andriescu, Michael Astner, Emil Brumaru
Emil Brumaru
Emil Brumaru is a contemporary Romanian writer and poet.- Works :* Versuri , 1970* Detectivul Arthur , 1970...
, Mariana Codruţ
Mariana Codruţ
Mariana Codruţ is a Romanian poet, writer and journalist.- Works :Poetry:* Măceşul din magazia de lemne .* Schiţă de autoportret ....
, Gabriel Horaţiu Decuble, Radu Pavel Gheo, Florin Lăzărescu, Ovidiu Nimigean, Antonio Patraş, Dan Sociu
Dan Sociu
Dan Sociu is a writer born May 20, 1978, in Botoşani, Romania. He belongs to the younger generation of poets, the so-called poets of 2000, who are often called representatives of "Miserabilism" by Romanian literary critics...
and Lucian Dan Teodorovici
Lucian Dan Teodorovici
Lucian Dan Teodorovici is a Romanian writer, journalist and editor. He works as co-ordinator of Polirom’s “Ego. Prose” series, and as senior editor of the...
.
The first volume bearing Lungu's signature saw print with Editura Junimea in 1996: a poetry collection, it carried the title Muchii ("Edges"). His stories, including Buldozeristul ("The Bulldozer Operator"), winner of the Editura Nemira prize for 1997, saw print in various venues during the late 1990s. Lungu also debuted as a dramatist, his work being included in two anthologies of young Romanian theater. The first among these writings is the 1995 Lecţie. Sau ceva de genul acesta ("A Lesson. Or Something like That"), first performed in 2002 by Bucharest's Green Hours fringe theater under the name of Cu cuţitul la os ("A Knife Cut to the Bone"); the second such text, published in 1996, was called Vinovatul să facă un pas înainte ("Will the Guilty Man Take One Step Forward"). Having made his editorial debut in short story with the 1999 collection Cheta la flegmă, he regularly published new works of fiction and cultural analysis over the following years. Between 2001 and 2002, he took over as editor in chief of Timpul.
In 2003, Lungu published three books of essays on literary theory and microsociology
Microsociology
Microsociology is one of the main branches of sociology, concerning the nature of everyday human social interactions and agency on a small scale. Microsociology is based on interpretative analysis rather than statistical or empirical observation, and shares close association with the philosophy of...
, titled respectively Povestirile vieţii. Teorie şi documente ("Life Stories. Theories and Documents"), Construcţia identităţii într-o societate totalitară. O cercetare sociologică asupra scriitorilor ("The Construction of Identity in a Totalitarian Society. A Sociological Study on Writers") and Cartografii în tranziţie. Eseuri de sociologia artei şi literaturii ("Transitional Cartographies. Essays of Art and Literary Sociology"). Also that year came a second work in drama, Nuntă la parter ("Wedding on the Ground Floor"), and a reprint of Cheta la flegmă under the title of Proză cu amănuntul ("Retail Prose"), which also featured a dossier of critical commentary from all sides of the literary scene and an account of his visit to Transnistria
Transnistria
Transnistria is a breakaway territory located mostly on a strip of land between the Dniester River and the eastern Moldovan border to Ukraine...
, a breakaway region of Romania's neighbor Moldova
Moldova
Moldova , officially the Republic of Moldova is a landlocked state in Eastern Europe, located between Romania to the West and Ukraine to the North, East and South. It declared itself an independent state with the same boundaries as the preceding Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1991, as part...
, governed as an unrecognized state. They were followed in 2004 by the novel Raiul găinilor. A second volume of short stories, titled Băieţi de gaşcă (Romanian
Romanian language
Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...
for both "Boys in a Gang" and "Good Fellows"), saw print in 2005. After joining fellow Club 8 member Gheo in authoring a study of social history
Social history
Social history, often called the new social history, is a branch of History that includes history of ordinary people and their strategies of coping with life. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments...
and microsociology, investigating impact of communist rule
Communist Romania
Communist Romania was the period in Romanian history when that country was a Soviet-aligned communist state in the Eastern Bloc, with the dominant role of Romanian Communist Party enshrined in its successive constitutions...
on Romanian women, published in 2008 as Tovarăşe de drum. Experienţa feminină în comunism ("Female Fellow Travelers. Female Experience under Communism"), Lungu returned to fiction with the 2009 novel Cum să uiţi o femeie ("How to Forget a Woman").
A resident of Iaşi, Dan Lungu is married and the father of two. One of the first authors from the post-Revolution period
History of Romania since 1989
- 1989 revolution :1989 marked the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. A mid-December protest in Timişoara against the eviction of a Hungarian minister grew into a country-wide protest against the Ceauşescu régime, sweeping the dictator from power....
to collect a steady profit from literary contributions, he invested his money into a chalet
Chalet
A chalet , also called Swiss chalet, is a type of building or house, native to the Alpine region, made of wood, with a heavy, gently sloping roof with wide, well-supported eaves set at right angles to the front of the house.-Definition and origin:...
on the outskirts of Iaşi. He visited France in 2005, invited by the Belles Etrangères cultural exchange program, and, in 2007, returned as a Writer-in-Residence at the Villa Mont Noir, Marguerite Yourcenar
Marguerite Yourcenar
Marguerite Yourcenar was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie française, in 1980, and the seventeenth person to occupy Seat 3.-Biography:Yourcenar was born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie...
's birthplace. He was twice nominated for the European Commission
European Commission
The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union. The body is responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and the general day-to-day running of the Union....
's Jean Monnet Award for Literature
Jean Monnet Programme
The Jean Monnet Programme, also known as the Jean Monnet Project, is a European Union initiative to encourage teaching, research and reflection in the field of European integration studies in higher education institutions...
in 2008. The target of much public interest, Sînt o babă comunistă! was considered for a film adaptation by Romanian director Stere Gulea
Stere Gulea
Stere Gulea is a Romanian film director and screenwriter.-Filmography:*Weekend cu mama *Stare de fapt , also screenplay*Vulpe - Vânǎtor...
.
As of 2009, Lungu's work had been translated into nine languages, including a critically acclaimed French-language version of Raiul găinilor (Le paradis des poules, Éditions Jacqueline Chambon, 2005). In its Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
translation, published in 2009, Sînt o babă comunistă! was included by El País daily in a "best of" chart for humorous literature. Also in 2009, a chart compiled by the satirical and lifestyle magazine Academia Caţavencu
Academia Catavencu
Academia Caţavencu is a Romanian satirical magazine founded in 1991 and made famous by its investigative journalism. Academia Caţavencu also owns Radio Guerrilla , an FM radio station with national coverage ; Tabu, a women's magazine, Superbebe, a magazine for new parents, Aventuri la pescuit, a...
ranked Lungu 46th among the "50 sexiest Romanian intellectuals".
Context
Ever since his debut in prose, Dan Lungu has drawn attention as a leading figure among a generational wave of prose writers, most of whom published their work with PoliromPolirom
Polirom or Editura Polirom is a Romanian publishing house with a tradition of publishing classics of international literature and also various titles in the fields of social sciences, such as psychology, sociology and anthropology. The company was founded in February 1995. The first title...
. Within the Polirom collection, which primarily comprises autofiction
Autofiction
Autofiction is a term used in literary criticism to refer to a form of fictionalized autobiography.Serge Doubrovsky coined the term in 1977 with reference to his novel Fils. Autofiction combines two paradoxically contradictory styles: that of autobiography, and fiction...
al works, Lungu's contribution is judged by critic Bianca Burţa-Cernat to have been among the "good/interesting/well-written" category. She believes him to be of the same rank as Cezar Paul-Bădescu, Victoria Comnea, Radu Pavel Gheo, Ana Maria Sandu, Cecilia Ştefănescu and Lucian Dan Teodorovici
Lucian Dan Teodorovici
Lucian Dan Teodorovici is a Romanian writer, journalist and editor. He works as co-ordinator of Polirom’s “Ego. Prose” series, and as senior editor of the...
, but below the "very good" category of Petre Barbu, T. O. Bobe
T. O. Bobe
T.O. Bobe is a Romanian poet and screenwriter for film and television.He graduated in 1995 after studying literature at the University of Bucharest....
, Filip Florian, Florin Lăzărescu, Sorin Stoica and Bogdan Suceavă.
The authentic streak of Lungu's narratives was highlighted by Mihaela Ursa, a literary reviewer for Apostrof
Apostrof
Apostrof is a monthly literary magazine published in Cluj-Napoca, Romania under the Romanian Writers' Union patronage. It was founded in 1990 by Babeş-Bolyai University professor Marta Petreu, who is also its editor in chief and main columnist...
magazine, who claimed: "With Dan Lungu, and not just with him, our literature seems to have fortunately parted with the complexes of the genius and that of the masterpiece, moving back closer to the reader." Poet and critic Octavian Soviany notes: "Dan Lungu refuses [...] the monarchic perspective of the demiurge
Demiurge
The demiurge is a concept from the Platonic, Neopythagorean, Middle Platonic, and Neoplatonic schools of philosophy for an artisan-like figure responsible for the fashioning and maintenance of the physical universe. The term was subsequently adopted by the Gnostics...
-novelist who always gazes on the world from above [...], for he treats his characters 'from one equal to another', places himself among them, advancing a vision 'from within' which confers upon the narrative some extra authenticity and naturalness." Also according to Soviany, Dan Lungu's prose is connected to "the great Balzacian
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
tradition" and "the masters of the verist
Verism
Verism is the artistic preference of contemporary everyday subject matter instead of the heroic or legendary in art and literature; a form of realism. The word comes from Latin verus .-In Roman art:...
short story". Similarly, literary critic Daniel Cristea-Enache argues that Lungu is separated from his generation by the understanding that prose is "in large measure written not for oneself, but for another. For others, the more of them the better." Researcher Cristina Chevereşan sees a special link between the works of Lungu, Florian and Stoica, "epics of life lived in the often suffocating circle of a collectivity as scanty and organically welded as it is oppressive".
In its immediate Romanian context, Lungu's work has occasionally been ranked among "recovery literature" pieces—diverse works which, in the post-censorship
Censorship in Communist Romania
Censorship in Communist Romania was widespread and virtually every published document, be it a newspaper article or a book, had to pass the censor's approval...
era, provide retrospective testimonies or analytical overviews of the communist period. This classification, which places Lungu alongside Petru Cimpoeşu and Ion Manolescu, is, according to critic Cosmin Ciotloş, exaggerated and simplistic: "Personally, I am rather skeptic toward any sort of necessity that is imposed or predictable." Another particularity of Lungu's work involves his local affiliation, connected with the culture of Iaşi city and the historical region
Historical regions of Romania
At various times during the late 19th and 20th centuries, Romania extended over the following historical regions:Wallachia:*Muntenia or Greater Wallachia: as part of Wallachia, joined Moldavia in 1859 to create modern Romania;...
of Moldavia
Moldavia
Moldavia is a geographic and historical region and former principality in Eastern Europe, corresponding to the territory between the Eastern Carpathians and the Dniester river...
. Cernat, who noted that Lungu has a preference for publishing his work with Iaşi-based venues, deduced "the strategy of asserting a personal project with several levels, which assigns a certain place to a 'Moldavian' (Iaşian) identity". Reportedly, Lungu refused several offers to move into Bucharest
Bucharest
Bucharest is the capital municipality, cultural, industrial, and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania, located in the southeast of the country, at , and lies on the banks of the Dâmbovița River....
, Romania's capital, to which he prefers his adoptive Iaşi.
Neorealism and Postmodernism
Dan Lungu himself places stress on his affiliation to a form of NeorealismNeorealism (art)
In art, neorealism was established by the ex-Camden Town Group painters Charles Ginner and Harold Gilman at the beginning of World War I. They set out to explore the spirit of their age through the shapes and colours of daily life...
deemed "microsocial
Microsociology
Microsociology is one of the main branches of sociology, concerning the nature of everyday human social interactions and agency on a small scale. Microsociology is based on interpretative analysis rather than statistical or empirical observation, and shares close association with the philosophy of...
"—that is, primarily concerned with everyday subjects and simple interactions between individuals. His main influences include foreign authors Peter Handke
Peter Handke
Peter Handke is an avant-garde Austrian novelist and playwright.-Early life:Handke and his mother lived in the Soviet-occupied Pankow district of Berlin from 1944 to 1948 before resettling in Griffen...
, Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq , born Michel Thomas, 26 February 1958—or 1956 —on the French island of Réunion, is a controversial and award-winning French author, filmmaker and poet. To admirers he is a writer in the tradition of literary provocation that reaches back to the Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire;...
and Elfriede Jelinek
Elfriede Jelinek
Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian playwright and novelist. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power."-...
, while his imagery has drawn comparisons with the films of Yugoslavian
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was the Yugoslav state that existed from the abolition of the Yugoslav monarchy until it was dissolved in 1992 amid the Yugoslav Wars. It was a socialist state and a federation made up of six socialist republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia,...
-born director Emir Kusturica
Emir Kusturica
Emir Nemanja Kusturica , is a Serbian filmmaker, actor and musician, recognized for several internationally acclaimed feature films...
. Lungu has also become one of the Romanian authors best-known outside Romania, and, according to literary critic Marius Chivu, one in the rare position of being recommended to a local public with quotes from foreign critics. This notoriety, coupled with the candor of his accounts, has reputedly sparked criticism that Lungu is "ruining Romania's image abroad", which prompted Lungu to state: "I am not a Foreign Ministry employee."
At the same time, Dan Lungu's literary contributions adopt a number of traits which have been defined as Postmodern
Postmodern literature
The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post–World War II literature and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature.Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact...
. These aspects include Lungu's parodic
Parody
A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
take on cliché
Cliché
A cliché or cliche is an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel. In phraseology, the term has taken on a more technical meaning,...
s and commonplace ideas, a process which, according to Ursa, results in "cultural short-circuits". His prose is also placed in connection to the debates surrounding the Postmodern nature of the Optzecişti, writers who debuted a decade before Lungu, but whose contribution is seen as influential on the young literary scene. Lungu is a successor to the Neorealist group among the Optzecişti, and seen by Moldovan literary critic Iulian Ciocan as less indebted to "the Postmodern paradigm
Paradigm
The word paradigm has been used in science to describe distinct concepts. It comes from Greek "παράδειγμα" , "pattern, example, sample" from the verb "παραδείκνυμι" , "exhibit, represent, expose" and that from "παρά" , "beside, beyond" + "δείκνυμι" , "to show, to point out".The original Greek...
". Writing in 2000, Ciocan argued: "Dan Lungu's debut is remarkable because the young writer does not frantically embrace the Postmodern technique and ontology
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
, but uses them only to the measure where they lend more authenticity to his prose." A similar point is made by Cristian Teodorescu, himself one of the Optzecişti, who parallels Lungu's storytelling techniques with those developed before 1989 by Mircea Nedelciu
Mircea Nedelciu
Mircea Nedelciu was a Romanian short-story writer, novelist, essayist and literary critic, one of the leading exponents of the Optzecişti generation in Romanian letters...
. Commenting on Lungu's relation to a larger historical and stylistic context, Burţa-Cernat wrote: "the prose writers of the newer category, the 'social anthropologists
Social anthropology
Social Anthropology is one of the four or five branches of anthropology that studies how contemporary human beings behave in social groups. Practitioners of social anthropology investigate, often through long-term, intensive field studies , the social organization of a particular person: customs,...
', do not aim to reinvent the world by capturing it within fabulous scenarios, but merely to describe it. They operate with a lens, a microscope [...], avid for describing its textures and the most anodyne of its details." This "minimalist
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
" tendency, she noted, falls in line with 1980 authors—Nedelciu, Teodorescu, Sorin Preda, Ioan Groşan—, and also includes Lungu's colleagues Stoica, Teodorovici, Radu Aldulescu, Andrei Bodiu
Andrei Bodiu
Andrei Bodiu is a Romanian poet, literary commentator, Professor of Literature and publicist.He graduated in Philology at the Universităţii din Timişoara in 1988....
and Călin Torsan. A distinct view is held by Cristea-Enache, who views Dan Lungu as one of the authors who parted with both "the endless ironical games" of the 1980 generation and the "harshness of 1990s naturalism
Naturalism (literature)
Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character...
", while avoiding "aesthetic compromise".
According to literary chronicler Bogdan Creţu, a "coherently voiced program" is observable throughout Lungu's work in fiction, and is encapsulated into Lungu's own reference to "retail prose". Dan Lungu acknowledges that his main literary works tend to center each on a particular narrative technique, but recounts that the substance for this technique is only apparent to himself a posteriori. The subtle connection between Lungu's sociological research and his fiction writings has also been discussed by critics Andrei Terian and Paul Cernat. The latter notes: "Dan Lungu is a professional who does not mix his levels: the areas are firmly separated, even if they communicate on the deep level of the overall project."
Debut
Some of Lungu's earliest published works were poetry pieces which, according to writer Şerban Axinte, do not reach the same standard as his other contributions: "Few still recall that Dan Lungu has debuted as a poet. The Muchii volume [...] no longer communicates much to us, even if [it] does not lack certain several good, intelligent texts, albeit lacking the force and consistency to impose an author." His debut work in short prose, grouped as Cheta la flegmă, is, in Iulian Ciocan's definition, a book about "the prisoners of everyday": a bulldozerBulldozer
A bulldozer is a crawler equipped with a substantial metal plate used to push large quantities of soil, sand, rubble, etc., during construction work and typically equipped at the rear with a claw-like device to loosen densely-compacted materials.Bulldozers can be found on a wide range of sites,...
operator, an asylum custodian, a thief, a group of soldiers, a child and an unhappy couple. According to critic and journalist Costi Rogozanu: "Under a 'strong' title, Dan Lungu collects the most diverse of prose pieces, some written in the most direct argot
Argot
An Argot is a secret language used by various groups—including, but not limited to, thieves and other criminals—to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations. The term argot is also used to refer to the informal specialized vocabulary from a particular field of study, hobby, job,...
ic language, others including the most meticulous of traditional lines. [...] The Iaşi-based writer sets to clearly delimit his area of interest—daily life in the post-Revolution period—, varying with irony the types of writing he uses." The shock value of the title was also noted by Cernat, who concluded that its apparent connection to the "miserabilist" tone of more radical Romanian literature was "rather inadequate". An argument of similar substance was provided by Cristea-Enache. In his view, the stories are "finely written" portraits of people caught in the "post-communist
Post-Communism
Post-communism is a name sometimes given to the period of political and economic transformation or "transition" in former Communist states located in parts of Europe and Asia, in which new governments aimed to create free market-oriented capitalist economies with some form of parliamentary...
transition", to the "stark setting of 'tower block
Tower block
A tower block, high-rise, apartment tower, office tower, apartment block, or block of flats, is a tall building or structure used as a residential and/or office building...
life' which nevertheless almost completely lacks—bizarrely—the 'consumerist
Consumerism
Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods and services in ever greater amounts. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen...
' and pop ingredients of post-communist kitsch
Kitsch
Kitsch is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that...
."
Ciocan interprets the work's overall perspective as: "Life is a spectacle both tragic and comical [...], into which 'things great and small' are undiscernably mixed together." According to the same critic, a common trait of the characters is their inability of discerning the human condition
Human condition
The human condition encompasses the experiences of being human in a social, cultural, and personal context. It can be described as the irreducible part of humanity that is inherent and not connected to gender, race, class, etc. — a search for purpose, sense of curiosity, the inevitability of...
: "The maximum they are capable of is having the revelation that 'today you are healthy, strong, drinking like a calf and subject to no harm, and tomorrow bam! the finger points! 'You die!', and you die just like that.' Egotistic, insolent, hypocritical characters, but also gentle, jovial, depending on the circumstances. They are incredibly authentic, convincing, owing precisely to their being stuck in the morass of everyday." Cernat proposes: "Just like in the works of his junior Sorin Stoica and those of a few others, one senses in these minute 'stories of life' the pleasure of collecting 'mentality samples'." Some of the book's characters have to deal with circumstances that test their limits: in Buldozeristul, the protagonist uses his machine to bury his wife and daughter after failing to speed up procedures for a proper funeral; an old age pensioner who seduces women while queuing for gas cylinder
Gas cylinder
A gas cylinder is a pressure vessel used to store gases at above atmospheric pressure. High pressure gas cylinders are also called bottles. Although they are sometimes colloquially called "tanks", this is technically incorrect, as a tank is a vessel used to store liquids at ambient pressure and...
refills; and, in the eponymous writing, a teenager who is publicly humiliated by having his hands and arms covered in spit.
Commenting on 2008 reprint, Ciotloş argued "a permanently invoked Cheta la flegmă of 1999 has become, four years later, a permanently appreciated Proză cu amănuntul", describing the fragments of reviews collected by Lungu as "unbelievably high". Cernat took a more negative view of the new edition, writing that, while the original stories were still relevant, they "only seems to have been republished in order to complete the author's 'polyvalent' profile". The reportage piece detailing Lungu's trip to Transnistria
Transnistria
Transnistria is a breakaway territory located mostly on a strip of land between the Dniester River and the eastern Moldovan border to Ukraine...
notably depicts the preservation of Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
and communist symbolism throughout the region, the officially sanctioned imposition of Moldovan Cyrillic even to the point where schoolteachers use it for transliterating French-language texts, and the religious aspects of local sports. According to Ciotloş: "The ideology of the 50s appears to have been frozen here for more than half a century."
The play Nuntă la parter pursues a different path, being structured as an abstract parable
Parable
A parable is a succinct story, in prose or verse, which illustrates one or more instructive principles, or lessons, or a normative principle. It differs from a fable in that fables use animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as characters, while parables generally feature human...
: characters known as the Soldiers, isolated from the outside world, are pushed by a commanding voice into performing sinister and absurd acts, including the so-called "wedding on the ground floor", while vaguer exterior sounds provide samples of communist slogans, chanting and, eventually, violence associated with the Revolution. Cernat, who calls the play Lungu's "most vulnerable" work, cites and agrees with the analysis provided by critic Alina Nelega, according to which the text is "a study of a mechanism, rather than a gallery of characters."
Povestirile vieţii and Construcţia identităţii
Povestirile vieţii, Lungu's scientific study of 2003, also marks his preoccupation with oral historyOral history
Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews...
as a path to investigating Romania's communist past, in particular the 1965-1989 regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu
Nicolae Ceausescu
Nicolae Ceaușescu was a Romanian Communist politician. He was General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and as such was the country's second and last Communist leader...
. Paul Cernat commends the work for breaking with the pattern of similar post-1989 recoveries, which mainly focus on interviews with political personalities. In contrast, Lungu's book centers on three study cases from working class
Working class
Working class is a term used in the social sciences and in ordinary conversation to describe those employed in lower tier jobs , often extending to those in unemployment or otherwise possessing below-average incomes...
environments—Florentina Ichim, Vasile Ariton and Petre Jurescu—whom the regime took pride in claiming were its support base. Their retrospective images of the era vary significantly, fluctuating between nostalgia and virulent anti-communism
Anti-communism
Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the rise of communism, especially after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the beginning of the Cold War in 1947.-Objections to communist theory:...
. However, all three witnesses recall having themselves resorted to alternative and illicit mechanisms of survival or self-promotion, in particular theft and political corruption
Political corruption
Political corruption is the use of legislated powers by government officials for illegitimate private gain. Misuse of government power for other purposes, such as repression of political opponents and general police brutality, is not considered political corruption. Neither are illegal acts by...
. In his commentary on the interviews, Lungu concluded that, in some cases, the image of workers' lifestyles as offered by the propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
apparatus was real, "contrary to our expectations". He added, to Cernat's agreement: "Overturning that which was officially stated during the epoch is not indicative of the real state of things and only drags us down into another ideology [...]. That is why we have said: back to the facts!" In his review of the book, literary critic Dan C. Mihăilescu resonated with such observations, noting their revelatory aspect: "once confronted with the accounts [...], I convinced myself once and for all that the things which, under Ceauşism, I could still believe united us into a solidarity of suffering, are as false as can be. That is, even though we waited in grueling queues, in the same cold, for the same food rations, an ocean existed between the proletariat
Proletariat
The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian...
[...] and the intellectuals, between 'base and superstructure
Base and superstructure
In Marxist theory, human society consists of two parts: the base and superstructure; the base comprehends the forces and relations of production — employer-employee work conditions, the technical division of labour, and property relations — into which people enter to produce the necessities and...
'. We were simply put two worlds, not just figuratively, but also effectively. There was nothing for us to sell and steal, whereas they had access to the circuits of theft, to the web of programmed lawlessness."
With Construcţia identităţii într-o societate totalitară, seen by Cernat as "a study up to the international standards" and a work of "entomological
Entomology
Entomology is the scientific study of insects, a branch of arthropodology...
precision", Dan Lungu focuses on how writers and intellectuals related to ideological pressures, explores in particular the theme of "resistance through culture" (as opposed to outspoken dissidence
Dissident
A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....
). The thesis advanced by Lungu is that Romania's pre-communist authoritarian traditions accompanied Westernization
Westernization
Westernization or Westernisation , also occidentalization or occidentalisation , is a process whereby societies come under or adopt Western culture in such matters as industry, technology, law, politics, economics, lifestyle, diet, language, alphabet,...
, and therefore failed to rally the society around the notion of legality. Paraphrasing the author's conclusions, Cernat writes: "The 'voluntarist
Voluntarism (action)
Voluntarism is sometimes used to mean the use of, or reliance on voluntary action to maintain an institution, carry out a policy, or achieve an end. In this context the word voluntary action means action based on free will, which in turn means action which is performed free from certain constraints...
and elitist
Elitism
Elitism is the belief or attitude that some individuals, who form an elite — a select group of people with intellect, wealth, specialized training or experience, or other distinctive attributes — are those whose views on a matter are to be taken the most seriously or carry the most...
' projects of emancipation, the intellectuals' paternalistic
Paternalism
Paternalism refers to attitudes or states of affairs that exemplify a traditional relationship between father and child. Two conditions of paternalism are usually identified: interference with liberty and a beneficent intention towards those whose liberty is interfered with...
Bovarysme
Bovarysme
Bovarysme is a term derived from Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary . It denotes a tendency toward escapist daydreaming in which the dreamer imagines himself or herself to be a hero or heroine in a romance, whilst ignoring the everyday realities of the situation. The eponymous Madame Bovary is an...
, the destruction of the traditional model of the village and the partial assumption of modern values in the urban environment, the weakness of civil society
Civil society
Civil society is composed of the totality of many voluntary social relationships, civic and social organizations, and institutions that form the basis of a functioning society, as distinct from the force-backed structures of a state , the commercial institutions of the market, and private criminal...
have all facilitated adaptation to the Stalinist
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
and, later, national-communist
National communism
The term National Communism describes the ethnic minority communist currents that arose in the former Russian Empire after Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik Party seized power in October 1917....
models [...]. Hence the duplicity, the lack of solidarity among the 'resisters' within a patriarchal
Patriarchy
Patriarchy is a social system in which the role of the male as the primary authority figure is central to social organization, and where fathers hold authority over women, children, and property. It implies the institutions of male rule and privilege, and entails female subordination...
, mostly rural, country..." Historian Cristian Vasile sees Lungu's study as akin to the contributions of anthropologist Katherine Verdery, in that it defines the writers' individual roles in "the process of transforming society and creating the new man
New Soviet man
The New Soviet man or New Soviet person , as postulated by the ideologists of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was an archetype of a person with certain qualities that were said to be emerging as dominant among all citizens of the Soviet Union, irrespective of the country's cultural,...
", while serving as an investigation of social identity
Social identity
A social identity is the portion of an individual's self-concept derived from perceived membership in a relevant social group. As originally formulated by Henri Tajfel and John Turner in the 1970s and 80s, social identity theory introduced the concept of a social identity as a way in which to...
constructs. Vasile quotes the book for its conclusions about the impact of agitprop
Agitprop
Agitprop is derived from agitation and propaganda, and describes stage plays, pamphlets, motion pictures and other art forms with an explicitly political message....
, socialist realism
Socialist realism in Romania
After World War II, socialist realism on the Soviet model was imposed on the USSR's new satellites, including Romania. This was accompanied by a series of organisational and repressive moves, for instance the incarceration of numerous poets...
and censorship on Romanian literature
Literature of Romania
Romanian literature is literature written by Romanian authors, although the term may also be used to refer to all literature written in the Romanian language.Eugène Ionesco is one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd....
and education
Education in Romania
According to the Law on Education adopted in 1995, the Romanian Educational System is regulated by the Ministry of Education and Research . Each level has its own form of organization and is subject to different legislation. Kindergarten is optional between 3 and 6 years old...
, including a corroboration of the censors' own dissatisfaction with their activity, or the link Lungu establishes between the spread of atheism
Atheism
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...
and the communist version of science education
Science education
Science education is the field concerned with sharing science content and process with individuals not traditionally considered part of the scientific community. The target individuals may be children, college students, or adults within the general public. The field of science education comprises...
. A distinct section of the essay refers to the tradition of Jewish Romanian
History of the Jews in Romania
The history of Jews in Romania concerns the Jews of Romania and of Romanian origins, from their first mention on what is nowadays Romanian territory....
literature, and in particular to the Jewish impact on modernist literature
Modernist literature
Modernist literature is sub-genre of Modernism, a predominantly European movement beginning in the early 20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms...
. In his review of the chapter, Cernat discussed the "relevant—if at times exaggerated—conclusions" Lungu draws on minority authors having been pushed by their social marginalization into becoming the cultural avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
. In Cernat's view, Construcţia identităţii... "imposes itself through span, seriousness and an irreproachable professionalism", but suffers from "a savant jargon which limits [its] reception to the circle of specialists."
Raiul găinilor
With Raiul găinilor, Lungu's extends his focus on provincial and suburban environments into novel form. The book, written over one summer, carries the subtitle "A faux novel of rumors and mysteries" and is defined by its author as a work on "the circulations of rumors". Its heroes are feeble men and women who interpret the larger world based on things that occur in their immediate vicinity, Acacia Street. The narrative borrows from the conventions of the frame storyFrame story
A frame story is a literary technique that sometimes serves as a companion piece to a story within a story, whereby an introductory or main narrative is presented, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage either for a more emphasized second narrative or for a set of shorter stories...
, and, Terian notes, owes direct inspiration to Hanu Ancuţei, an interwar
Interwar period
Interwar period can refer to any period between two wars. The Interbellum is understood to be the period between the end of the Great War or First World War and the beginning of the Second World War in Europe....
volume by the classic Romanian author Mihail Sadoveanu
Mihail Sadoveanu
Mihail Sadoveanu was a Romanian novelist, short story writer, journalist and political figure, who twice served as acting republican head of state under the communist regime . One of the most prolific Romanian-language writers, he is remembered mostly for his historical and adventure novels, as...
. While Terian believes Raiul găinilor to be primarily calm and distant, his colleague Mircea Iorgulescu, who prefaced the work, argued: "Under a benign and slow-going appearance, the novel's world is actually terrifying. It lives mechanically, though automatisms
Automatic behavior
Automatic behavior, from the Greek automatos or self-acting, is the spontaneous production of often purposeless verbal or motor behavior without conscious self-control or self-censorship...
which provide it with a kind of demented functioning, similar to one of the characters, a woman who endlessly knits pullovers without watching her own hands." One fragment which drew critical attention is that in which the humble Milică, who has once been allowed into the house of the reclusive, imposing and envied Colonel, embellishes the account of its luxurious standards in order to captivate his peers. Similarly, the mythomaniacal factory worker Mitu obsesses over his supposed chance encounter with communist leader Ceauşescu. In addition to these topical aspects, the novel fictionalizes professional incompetence, feud
Feud
A feud , referred to in more extreme cases as a blood feud, vendetta, faida, or private war, is a long-running argument or fight between parties—often groups of people, especially families or clans. Feuds begin because one party perceives itself to have been attacked, insulted or wronged by another...
, adultery
Adultery
Adultery is sexual infidelity to one's spouse, and is a form of extramarital sex. It originally referred only to sex between a woman who was married and a person other than her spouse. Even in cases of separation from one's spouse, an extramarital affair is still considered adultery.Adultery is...
and working class drinking culture
Drinking culture
Drinking culture refers to the customs and practices associated with the consumption of alcoholic beverages. Although alcoholic beverages and social attitudes toward drinking vary around the world, nearly every civilization has independently discovered the processes of brewing beer, fermenting...
. It ultimately deals with the impact of post-Revolution economic transition, reflected in the characters' ambiguous memories of Ponzi scheme
Ponzi scheme
A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money or the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation...
s, or projected in the account of how the closure of non-lucrative factories prevented the employees from continuing to steal industrial materials. According to Andrei Terian, the book is primarily relevant for the way in the "captivating" and "discreet" narrative supports events of marginal importance, with "the absence of any demonstrative intent" for a defining characteristic. Lungu however recounted having written it with "pleasure, a masochistic pleasure".
Writing in 2005, French reviewer Alexandre Fillon argued that Raiul găinilor proved a "hilarious" read, whose plot "says a lot about the Romania of yesterday and of the present." However, he also wrote that the work "did not receive critical unanimity". In contrast, Terian defines the reaction of Romanian reviews as "virtually unanimous adhesion".
Băieţi de gaşcă
Băieţi de gaşcă, which comprises 11 short stories, is noted for its alternation of purist aesthetics and challenging use of Romanian slangRomanian profanity
Romanian profanity refers to a set of words considered blasphemous or inflammatory in the Romanian language.Romanian is considered to have a huge set of inflammatory terms and phrases...
, while its attempt to isolate pieces of the everyday creates a link with reportage. This approach to storytelling is likened by Bogdan Creţu with the prose of Alexandru Monciu-Sudinski, while Cristian Teodorescu connects it with J. D. Salinger
J. D. Salinger
Jerome David Salinger was an American author, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature. His last original published work was in 1965; he gave his last interview in 1980....
's Nine Stories
Nine Stories (Salinger)
Nine Stories is a collection of short stories by American fiction writer J. D. Salinger released in May 1953. It includes two of his most famous short stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "For Esmé – with Love and Squalor". Nine Stories (1953) is a collection of short stories by American...
and the poetry of Emil Brumaru
Emil Brumaru
Emil Brumaru is a contemporary Romanian writer and poet.- Works :* Versuri , 1970* Detectivul Arthur , 1970...
. Noting the difficulties of this approach, particularly in those stories which explore the marginal areas of Romanian society, Creţu commends Dan Lungu for opting in favor of first-person narrative
First-person narrative
First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...
s written from within, which allow him to preserve the authenticity of uncultured or ungrammatical speech. In Teodorescu's account, the author "grows so close to his characters that he ends up completely inside their skins. He takes the voice of a little girl shocked by the brutality of family life and the promiscuity of life in a block apartment. Or he turns himself into a gang boy and recounts his experiences in argotic language, which does not shy away from any of the words censored out of the latest Dicţionarul explicativ al limbii române
Dictionarul explicativ al limbii române
Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române is the most important dictionary of the Romanian language, published by the Institute of Linguistics of the Romanian Academy .It was first edited in 1975...
edition." Daniel Cristea-Enache highlights the individualized use of language and gestures, from the "infantile repetitiousness" characteristic of little girls to the "style of tricky young men", believing these traits to be in line with "the exploitation of orality
Orality
Orality is thought and verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy are unfamiliar to most of the population. The study of orality is closely allied to the study of oral tradition...
" by authors such as Sorin Stoica and Ovidiu Verdeş.
While noting that Lungu's Băieţi de gaşcă stories inherently fail to explore "a more profound vision", Creţu argues: "Dan Lungu [nevertheless] manages to render this shortcoming relative through irresistible comedy: not one of word play
Word play
Word play or wordplay is a literary technique in which the words that are used become the main subject of the work, primarily for the purpose of intended effect or amusement...
[...], but one of situation
Situation comedy
A situation comedy, often shortened to sitcom, is a genre of comedy that features characters sharing the same common environment, such as a home or workplace, accompanied with jokes as part of the dialogue...
." The volume's eponymous story thus alternates between the apparent seriousness of gang culture and the obstacles they face as individuals, with episodes such as one gang member's frustrations over his girlfriend's nymphomania
Sexual addiction
Sexual addiction is a popular model to explain hypersexuality—sexual urges, behaviors, or thoughts that appear extreme in frequency or feel out of one's control...
. Other sections of the volume strike a different note, and include a fictionalized account the life of a young Englishwoman
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
who decides to settle in Romania. Focusing on Lungu's ability to surprise his readers, Teodorescu commented: "Once in a while, if one does not want to let himself be conquered by his tricks, one may have reactions of mistrust [...] Dan Lungu anticipates this reaction as well and builds up complicity for what he does, like a prestidigitator who, at the same time as jokingly letting you in on how he has made you believe that he was able to cut himself in two, leads you into the fog of the next trick [...]. Whoever carefully reads Dan Lungu gets a free lesson in the manipulation techniques to which all those who wish to have us convinced of the truth in non-literary fiction will expose us without warning and at times successfully." Cristea-Enache, who praised Băieţi de gaşcă for displaying "natural breathing", "stylistic mobility" and "dexterity", also argued: "When the young prose author will manage to inject more substance into both his stories and novels, we shall have in him a leading exponent of this new-old literature."
Sînt o babă comunistă!
With the ample first-person narrative Sînt o babă comunistă!, Lungu explores the theme of nostalgia and its pitfalls. Through introspection and flashbackFlashback (narrative)
Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory...
s, the volume depicts the disorientation and anguish of Emilia (Mica) Apostoae, an aging woman whose longing for the childhood and youth she spent under the communist regime make her block out negative memories of the period. According to Mihaela Ursa, the novel builds on two "extremely productive" sources, "literature about childhood (fed by the tremor of retrospection) and the literature of 'the innocent' (of picaresque
Picaresque novel
The picaresque novel is a popular sub-genre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts, in realistic and often humorous detail, the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society...
extraction)." In Soviany's view, the text recalls the works of Moldovan author Vasile Ernu and elements from classic works in Romanian literature (from Ion Creangă
Ion Creanga
Ion Creangă was a Moldavian-born Romanian writer, raconteur and schoolteacher. A main figure in 19th century Romanian literature, he is best known for his Childhood Memories volume, his novellas and short stories, and his many anecdotes...
's Childhood Memories
Childhood Memories (Creangă)
Childhood Memories is one of the main literary contributions of Romanian author Ion Creangă...
to Marin Preda
Marin Preda
Marin Preda was a Romanian novelist, one of the best-known post-WWII Romanian writers.Preda was born in Teleorman county, in a village called Siliştea-Gumeşti, into a family of peasants. He first studied at school in his home village, then schools in Abrud and Cristur-Odorhei...
's Moromeţii
Morometii
Moromeţii is a novel by the Romanian author Marin Preda, one which consecrated him as the most important novelist in the post-World War II Romanian literature....
), while Axinte believes it a synthesis of Lungu's own narrative techniques, seeping into "a kind of discourse objectification that has rarely been frequented in recent times." Ciotloş places stress on the work's reworking of communist stereotype
Stereotype
A stereotype is a popular belief about specific social groups or types of individuals. The concepts of "stereotype" and "prejudice" are often confused with many other different meanings...
s. He argues that Emilia Apostoae's early biography, in particular her migration from village to urban center, assimilates a theme from socialist realism ("the prose works produced and expired during the 1950s"), while the aspects of narrative language incorporate the diverse avatars of speech under ideological pressure, from the "parental and always costly discussions" confronting politically appointed supervisors and their nonconformist employees to subversive forms of Romanian humor and the "wooden tongue" of official speeches. Spread out between these fragments of authentic speech are Lungu's own observations, which prompt Ciotloş to argue: "[...] this is where [the novel's] originality can be found, in the rare moments when he decides to intervene. When he blocks out the verbal stream to produce a funny remark, when he stretches a joke over several chapters, when, instead of diacritic
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
s, he places on the cover a majestic and Soviet five-cornered star
Red star
A red star, five-pointed and filled, is an important ideological and religious symbol which has been used for various purposes, such as: state emblems, flags, monuments, ornaments, and logos.- Symbol of communism :...
."
The narrative hook
Narrative hook
A narrative hook is a literary technique in the opening of a story that "hooks" the reader's attention so that he or she will keep on reading...
in Sînt o babă comunistă! is provided by Emilia's attempt to define her political convictions, after being questioned by her daughter Alice. The content Emilia finds in juxtaposing communism and the happier moments of her life, peaking into episodes of utopia
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
nism, are seen as observation-based attempts to characterize an entire generation of Romanians. Emilia's erroneous train of thought becomes apparent in episodes where she recalls her employment at a state-owned factory. Her ideal, Ursa notes, is actually that of an "anti-world", where negative values are made to look positive: "work before the lunch break, so that one could slack off afterward [...], 'creative' solutions for increasing productivity, generalized theft ('there was enough to steal from'), painting fir trees green when a visit by Ceauşescu was due, the presence of a good-natured man who traded in political jokes (the assigned informer, as it would turn out)." The constant movement between "before" and "after", Soviany notes, follow "the pendulum
Pendulum
A pendulum is a weight suspended from a pivot so that it can swing freely. When a pendulum is displaced from its resting equilibrium position, it is subject to a restoring force due to gravity that will accelerate it back toward the equilibrium position...
principle", serving to illustrate Emilia's sense of time and the experience of change as nauseating. The object of the novel, according to the critic, is comparable to the scope of a Bildungsroman
Bildungsroman
In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...
: "[Sînt o babă comunistă!] becomes the book about the female protagonist's transition from the infantile and paradise-like stage [...] toward reflection and doubt, therefore toward maturity." The importance of this transformation to the plot is also discussed by Axinte, who argues that its revelations compensate for the fact that the novel "does not provide anything new (as information and biographical document) for those born and bred under communism." Cosmin Ciotloş sees the manner in which Lungu "tames with candor" the elements of a communist-style biography as "socialist realism redeeming itself on the last stretch of the race", stripped of conventions to become "purebred sociological realism". In Lungu's own definition, the book is built around "the decision process blueprint, where pros and cons confront themselves in the present, while invoking their timely roots."
Tovarăşe de drum
Tovarăşe de drum, the oral history collection coordinated by Lungu and his colleague Radu Pavel Gheo in 2008, groups together the testimonies of 17 intellectual women with various social backgrounds, all of whom reflect back on totalitarian pressures. The list mostly includes professional writers, among them Adriana Babeţi, Carmen Bendovski, Rodica Binder, Adriana Bittel, Mariana CodruţMariana Codruţ
Mariana Codruţ is a Romanian poet, writer and journalist.- Works :Poetry:* Măceşul din magazia de lemne .* Schiţă de autoportret ....
, Sanda Cordoş, Nora Iuga, Simona Popescu, Iulia Popovici, Doina Ruşti
Doina Rusti
Doina Ruşti is a contemporary Romanian novelist. All her works were published after the Romanian Revolution of 1989....
and Simona Sora. According to Bianca Burţa-Cernat, the study, part of a "war on silence", falls in line with earlier contributions in this field—particularly those of Gabriel Horaţiu Decuble, Doina Jela and Tia Şerbănescu. Marius Chivu also underlines their subject's proximity to Cristian Mungiu's award-winning film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a 2007 Romanian film written and directed by Cristian Mungiu. It won the Palme d'Or and the FIPRESCI Award at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival....
. The narratives often focus on the presence and use of mundane objects, from Western
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
contraband
Contraband
The word contraband, reported in English since 1529, from Medieval French contrebande "a smuggling," denotes any item which, relating to its nature, is illegal to be possessed or sold....
items such as condom
Condom
A condom is a barrier device most commonly used during sexual intercourse to reduce the probability of pregnancy and spreading sexually transmitted diseases . It is put on a man's erect penis and physically blocks ejaculated semen from entering the body of a sexual partner...
s and fragrance, to monopoly
Monopoly
A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity...
products of the state economy.
Among the diverse accounts in Tovarăşe de drum, Burţa-Cernat singles out those of Babeţi, who recalls the importance tote bag
Tote bag
A tote bag is large and open bag, with a handle centered atop each side. In the classic cloth version, arched straps form both handles. Straps' ends run down both sides, ending under the second fabric layer there, which shields the lower surfaces...
s had for her family during two decades of communism, and Bittel, who speaks about the ideal female cook, as "the queen of sarmale
Sarma (food)
Sarma is a dish of grape, cabbage or chard leaves rolled around a filling usually based on minced meat. It is found in the cuisines of the former Ottoman Empire from the Middle East to the Balkans and Central Europe.-Etymology and names:...
". She is however critical of the fact that such a contribution was initiated by men, arguing that this impinges on its merits: "given the way in which they write here, the ladies invited to partake in this collective project leave the impression that they are striving to fall in line with the rules of a game, [...] to confirm [...] the already consolidated idea about them: the idea of difference—much too essentialist
Essentialism
In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. Therefore all things can be precisely defined or described...
(and it is biological essentialism that is involved here)—, the idea that [...] they see the world, politics included, different from humanity's masculine majority." As part of this comment, she also argues that the book is excessively indebted to concrete economic aspects which women found especially challenging, whereas the "generically human" intellectual needs are "placed in brackets". Chivu, who saw the work as fluctuating between the seriousness of Ruşti's account and Babeţi's humorous recollection, believed Simona Popescu's contribution, which describes communist experience as "laughing out of pity", to be "the most balanced". In reference to the entire text, and in particular accounts of the ban on abortion
Abortion in Romania
Abortion in Romania is legal during the first 14 weeks of the pregnancy. Abortions during later stages of pregnancy are legal only when the woman's life is at risk...
, he argues: "all [its] female authors fundamentally speak about the same thing: the torment of being a woman, between the frustration of having one's intimacy forbidden and the efforts of illicit femininity." Babeţi's account was also viewed with interest by journalist Florentina Ciuverca, who also drew attention to Ruşti's story about how, despite the official campaign against abortion, a doctor preemptively subjected her to curettage
Curettage
Curettage, in medical procedures, is the use of a curette to remove tissue by scraping or scooping.Curettages are also a declining method of abortion. It has been replaced by vacuum aspiration over the last decade....
over a case of vaginal bleeding
Vaginal bleeding
Vaginal bleeding refers to bleeding in females that is either a physiologic response during the non-conceptional menstrual cycle or caused by hormonal or organic problems of the reproductive system. Vaginal bleeding may occur at any age, but always needs investigation when encountered in female...
.
Cum să uiţi o femeie
Written during Lungu's stay at the Villa Mont Noir, Cum să uiţi o femeie is the story of Andi, an investigative journalistInvestigative journalism
Investigative journalism is a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic of interest, often involving crime, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing. An investigative journalist may spend months or years researching and preparing a report. Investigative journalism...
employed by a seedy newspaper, covering the period after his lover Marga decides to leave him unannounced. Lungu, who likens the volume's technique with a Möbius strip
Möbius strip
The Möbius strip or Möbius band is a surface with only one side and only one boundary component. The Möbius strip has the mathematical property of being non-orientable. It can be realized as a ruled surface...
and a "psychological zoom", focuses on his protagonist's subsequent dismay, showing him as both character and narrator, while detailing his series of failed love affairs and his conclusion that Magda had never loved him. A secondary element in the plot recounts Andi's tightening bond with his landlord, the Adventist preacher Set, a process illustrated by dialogues which evolve between proselytism
Proselytism
Proselytizing is the act of attempting to convert people to another opinion and, particularly, another religion. The word proselytize is derived ultimately from the Greek language prefix προσ- and the verb ἔρχομαι in the form of προσήλυτος...
and compassion. According to Marius Chivu, the relationship between Set and Andi is "the novel's consistent part" and a "tour de force", owing to "the natural manner and the authenticity with which [Lungu] recomposes the missionary and religious message." Chivu concludes: "Set is the actual character in this (elegantly written, but lacking in stylistic pretensions) novel, having, overall, enough pathos for a subject far more delicate than love for a woman, that is the love for one's neighbor. For some readers, this may mean very much." According to critic and writer Ovidiu Şimonca, Cum să uiţi o femeie is "tight, ambitious, inciting", but the story line "is wrapped in too many outside details".
The author himself compared Cum să uiţi o femeie with Sînt o babă comunistă!, noting that it was the first of his works to be completely separated from the memory of communism. He specified feeling "intoxicated" by his earlier themes and having an explicit wish was to create "a one hundred percent romance novel
Romance novel
The romance novel is a literary genre developed in Western culture, mainly in English-speaking countries. Novels in this genre place their primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and must have an "emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending." Through the late...
", arguing: "It was much harder for me to write about the world of Neoprotestantism
Evangelicalism
Evangelicalism is a Protestant Christian movement which began in Great Britain in the 1730s and gained popularity in the United States during the series of Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th century.Its key commitments are:...
than from a feminine perspective." He added having felt "a vague and persistent fear that there were mistakes to be made with each step [of the writing process]", explaining: "This being a setting relatively unknown to me, it was easily conceivable that I could have missed or inadequately placed significant details. I was also obsessed with the fear of not offending, not carelessly hurting the dignity of a religious minority. I did not write these articles so as to vilify the born again, to perpetuate all sort of stereotypes about them, but to understand them and to create a powerful character, as I would hope is the case with presbyter
Presbyter
Presbyter in the New Testament refers to a leader in local Christian congregations, then a synonym of episkopos...
Set [...]." Lungu also mentioned having learned to discard his own preconceptions about minority religions, and recounted having asked a pastor
Pastor
The word pastor usually refers to an ordained leader of a Christian congregation. When used as an ecclesiastical styling or title, this role may be abbreviated to "Pr." or often "Ps"....
to verify the narrative as one from inside the religious phenomenon.
Answering to objections about the lack of focus on the central love affair, he commented: "It is, most of all, a novel about memory: what happens to memory and how it restructures itself after a sentimental fracture in one's biography. Things are not very clear-cut, there is no single narrative in one's resurrecting memory, there is a passage from one zone to another, things are slippery, subtle, nuanced. [...] Memory is like an onion that, when peeled, only grows bigger." He added that the novel could be read as the antithesis
Antithesis
Antithesis is a counter-proposition and denotes a direct contrast to the original proposition...
between the daily and the eternal: Andi's place of employment ("the newspaper") and the object of Christian reverence ("the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
").
External links
- Official site
- Cartografii în tranziţie, online version at the Editura LiterNet site