Someone
once told me, the word Romanian
speaks less to nationality than it does to career. Job description:
on a daily basis the candidate must juggle ridicule and despair,
cynicism and familial
gallows humor and avidity for life. You can’t live here without
hearing countless citizens recite: “Beautiful country. Too bad it’s
populated.” The basic question for foreigners is, “what the hell
are you doing here?” That’s the
existential question, and the sine
qua non of
successful Romanian-ness involves addressing it to one’s self six
times a day. History is the nightmare from which no one can wake,
politics yields overwhelming reasons for disgust, there’s a
cultural escape valve that issues in the absurd, and on top of that
the ambience turns up a daily circus where friendships are warmer
than anyplace else—which brings us, naturally, to Razvan Petrescu.
Doctor
turned writer, Petrescu has a bibliography that includes
award-winning theater writing, short fiction, and, most recentlyFoxtrot
XX,
an assemblage that defies classification while it enacts the
absurdity of Twentieth Century Romania, which amounts to the
absurdity of life, writ large—what else?
JH:
Why Foxtrot?
RP: After many
hours of atrocious thought, I hit on the Foxtrot because it’s
danced to a rapid, syncopated beat, on top of which it’s one of
those slow-slow-fast-fast dances, which suits the way I write, and
also because although the foxtrot came out in 1914, for me it’s a
dance that defines almost the entire century, or anyhow its last
decade, which I talk about in the text. And I picked it because it’s
a couple’s dance. In the book I have a host of dance partners, and
I step on their feet.” Razvan
PETRESCU in and interview with Bogdan ROMANIUC, June
21-27, 2008, in Suplimentul
de cultura.
JH:
Ouch! Sounds funny.
MC:More
than funny. Petrescu is comparable
any old time to the Romanian greats—Caragiale, Sadoveanu or
Preda—on account of his acute sense of observation. This writer is
a stylist whose texts are loaded with personality, and they slide
easily into the parodic and absurd.Marius
CHIVU, June 11 2008, in Adevarul
literar si artistic
JH:
What’s the modus operandi here? How do you create that “dying
fall at the end of a phrase?”
RP:
As regards the finale of some of my phrases, they fall into the
absurd because everything is absurd. That must be the sense of life.
Think how absurd it is that we tie our shoelaces. Or that we unlace
them. You have to wonder if things aren’t somehow ridiculous in
toto. It’s a matter of ridiculousness with a tragic finish.Razvan
PETRESCU in an interview with Marius CHIVU, Septembrie 2008, inDilemateca
JH:
I gather that in spite of the journalistic nuances and the high level
of parody, this is writing that issues from a very personal point of
view.
DCM:
It’s an ego-fictional centrifuge with an incontinent narrative. The
author’s self-irony seems to disguise disappointed narcissism. Dan
C. MIHAILESCU, July 1, 2008, in “Omul care aduce cartea,” on PRO
TV
JH:
Aren’t we all subject to similar disappointments? Don’t we read
to have our secrets expressed for us? But auto-fiction goes beyond
that. What kind of writer do we have here, in the end?
SC:
A writer who feels enormously and sees monstrously, “a
neuroromantic” by his own definition, disappointed and, at the same
time, with a lively interest in an absurd world that makes no sense,
but which “attains…every so often…moments of unbearable
beauty.” Sanda
CORDOS, September 2008, in Dilemateca
MM:
Răzvan Petrescu is from the category of those rare authors for whom
writing is joy and deperation in equal measure, who changes, and
discovers himself and grows by writing. At the age of 33, in still
turbulent times, he decided to give up medicine, a secure profession
for which he was extremely well prepared, and to remain a simple
builder of castles in the air. Knowing him to be an incorrigible
bohemian, I should have reproached him for this desertion. Only,
rereading his work, I realize yet again that it wasn’t he who made
the choice. He was chosen. [We are talking here about the] fatality
of vocation...Mircea
MARTIN, introducing Eclipsa
/ The Eclipse
Bucharest: Cartea Românească, 1993
JH:
Let’s talk about the short fiction. How would you characterize
it?
ES :
The stories in The Summer Garden /
Grădina de varăI are remarkable for
their psychological observation [which shows up as the]… capacity
to organize a [particular] confession or to nail down a collective
tableaux...The language is...to the point, without wasted words.
What’s essential here is the study of human nature in a state of
psychic and moral crisis. This acuity brings Razvan Petrescu close to
the family of “analysts.” Eugen
SIMION, în România
literară
nr. 23, 1989
TU: …Răzvan Petrescu has a participative
attitude. He gets close to his characters, affectionately, a little
sadly, with understanding and...compassion, like a doctor faced with
the sick people he’s called to treat....the realistic description
is cinematic, with faithful renditions of the characters’
gestures, words, thoughts. [In my opinion] Waltz!is the most successful story in the
collection—the ... interior monologue of a lonely woman who recalls
her existential failure. The writer catches the psychology of lonely
people tyrannized by capricious memory, impossible to control.Tudorel
URIAN, “Amfiteatru”, nr. 9, 1989
JH: What
else can we say about Petrescu’s technique?
MP:
Petrescu...is an adept of a more traditional kind of realism in
registers that pass from… naturalistic reminiscences to a fiction
of manners influenced by Anglo-saxon writing with a certain humor
either of the Jerome K. Jerome type or...more concretely by way of
Chandler, [including] “objective realism” ...with its preference
for sarcastic satire and psychological sketch... Marian
PAPAHAGI, “Tribuna,” July, 1989
NM :
In Springtime at the Dive / Primăvara
la bufet everyone in the joint has
something to say. The identities of the voices are secondary. What
matters is how a social and moral universe constitutes itself from
this verbal material—as happens with Caragiale and Preda,
uncontested masters....It’s a matter of permanent stylistic
variation, a continuous change of registers, as if this prose has
more speeds, ordinarily unknown in realist fiction...The success, the
gain out of all this is that in the zone of realist prose the
transcription of spoken language...leads to an irresistibly comic
vocabulary...Beyond this the parables are also remarkable. Black
encephalitis/ Encefalita neagră is
Borgesian. Death of a guinea pig /
Moartea unui cobai is Swiftean,. The
Farse/Farsa
is Cain and Abel in modern dress...[All in all] this writing is a
jewel. Nicolae
MANOLESCU, România
literară,
nr. 11, 1993
JH: I
gather that all this technique is in the service of creating a
portrait of Romania as fantastically anxious—both as a communist
and then post-communist world.
AB:
The majority of Răzvan Petrescu’s heroes live at the limit, on the
edge, in a kind of doubtful zone, worn out, tense because they have
born or are about to bear [some kind of] transformation—and this in
spite of respective social status or profession… [Here] the short
story At the Dive /La buffet is
exemplary…in that it attains the focus of an entire novel [in ten
pages] with maximum intensity [and] economy of means. [I can’t
think of another ten pages that] could so convincingly trace a
collective portrait of a group that gathers to disband… irradiated
by an exterior evil, but by an inner evil as well, so that it plunges
finally into the most brutal reality [but also into] the most poetic
irreality. The fantastic and the use of imagination are the only
paths toward the reanimation of a world in agony, and the best
solutions are literary therapy… Adriana
BABEŢI “Orizont”, nr. 32, 1989
