When Radu Cosaşu writes a sentence, the words have a ball, no less, and what else could they do? Nuance tone and whimsy get together in a textual paradise. Personally, I have never run into such verbal dressage—words: new with old, exclamations with doubts, limpid things with metaphors, laughter with tears, fact with fantasy, left with right, rabbits side by side with tigers—all without sign of carrot or stick. And let me tell you, hand on heart, I love the circus. Animal trainers fascinate me.
I think that if we could come to terms with the “chemical” formulas of irony and gratuity and accept the tiny little idea that in literature the larger whole is made of illusions and details, then we might discover before the rest of the crowd (who will surely find it out one fine day, just as they discovered the steam engine in the end) that the novel of the Romanian communist period is right here under our noses, collected in The Survivals, whose volumes number one through five, so far.
