The Days of the King
Filip Florian
Polirom, 2008, 270 pp.
Filip Florian belongs to the select club of “writers’ writers.” Days of the King is his third outing, and although it is evident by now that Florian never writes from the same playbook, something ineffably “Florianesque” animates his prose from one novel to the next. InDays of the King—unprecedented in style and narrative arrangement—Florian tells the enthralling story of Joseph Strauss, a dentist who accepts an extraordinary invitation from a patient—then captain of Dragoons, Karl Eitel Friedrich Zephyrinus Ludwig of Hohenzollern-Sigmaring—who will soon to become Prince Carol I of Romania. Strauss follows the Prince on a journey to Bukarest [same moniker, different spelling] in 1866. Here, the atmospheric writing is so enthralling that the fictional/historic narrative almost competes with the atmosphere-as-character of Bukarest, a dusty city in a kingdom at the provincial back of beyond. Bukarest teems with dynamic flashbacks that capture common people’s personal stories while the unrest of great historical events catches them in its web. The city pulses with great infusions of authentic local color, sensuous and visual details.
Here two characters climb a tower and marvel at the slowly civilizing influence of the German prince:
They were not interested in catching a glimpse of fires in the distance. They were not thinking about those who built the tower (some Swedish soldiers in the army of Karl XII, lost in the East after being defeated at Poltava). They counted the steps, one hundred eighty-eight, had no idea there had been more—two hundred and fourteen—before the devastating earthquake of 1802 sliced off the building’s conical roof. They simply looked at the horizon in utter surprise, in each other’s arms, quiet, perspiring for too many reasons: scorching heat, spiral climb, joy, yearning, and tenderness for hundreds of sparrows that had made their nests under the eaves. From high above, Bukarest appeared unlike anything they had seen or imagined. Clouds of dust like tiny spots followed the carriages. Roofs and chimneys waited for the rain, and the cold, church towers and bells seemed to stop scratching the sky. The river Dîmboviţa glittered in a lively way while the Bucurestioara emanated gloom, for the two rivers faced the cardinal points from different angles. The royal palace was in no way more majestic than some of the boyards’ houses (Carol I was absent for sure, driven away by the stifling heat, chores, and spleen). The brown waste land loomed up, and patches of dusty green forest like olives in brine, the hospital, the school, and the monastery at the foot of the tower had shrunk, a hundred thousand souls at their feet, each living by his own law and all by the laws of the Lord and of the United Principalities, eating or dozing off, breathing and sweating.
One more thing: Dentist Strauss has a magical, literary cat.
