interweaving facts details – betrays, here and there, different creative stages in preparing the draft, as well as well as the vibrato of the psychological ages of inclusion, analysis and author‟s understanding of countless aspects of the described historical phenomen. At the incipit of the first part named Ordinul de evacuare (The Evacuation Order), for instance, the writer seems to have the patience to surprise and break down carefully the characters‟s movements in full gestures of general-human meanings, the narratological method meant to create the sensation of phenomenal, but also of real life, intensly pulsating and colourful, the free indirect style allows at this stage of writing a panoramic view and an objective analysis of facets and aspects of different environments a family of refugees passes through during the exode itself and afterwards, towards the end of the same part, concluded with the lamento with symbolic resonances of the mother who cries her dead child, assaulted by the multitude of psycho-social schizoid factors which upset her, Ion Lazu‟s phrase splits up, often letting the place for internal broken and nevralgic, tragic and delirious monologue. It might be said that such a course follows naturally the internal logic of the tissue – which up to a certain point is absolutely true –, on the other hand though, as the author‟s theme and the occurent configuration mature – amid terrible fight for survival – of meditation on history calamities, life, old age, death etc. the subject is written passionately himself on the author and clearly marks him. In the same interview given recently, Ion Lazu recognized, or else, he thought all his life about his subject…The action of the novel spreads on more than fifty years, starting with March 13th 1944, when Marshal Antonescu orders the evacuation of large groups of Bessarabia population in front of the Soviet troops, and up to September 1997, when the last mature representative of a family dislocated from the bank of Dniester dies naturally in a village near Slatina where, although he built a house with great difficulties, he lived only with the nostalgia of the lost paradise of native land. A novel of fiction composed attentively out of who knows how many real facts happened as such in the family of the author, re-invented, out of the internal need of text harmonious self-generation, merely severed from the collective memory or adorned out of architechtonical reasons, Veneticii is coagulated from an extremely genuine original vision of an odyssey of displacement and survival under wicked historical conditions of a family of Bessarabian townfolk characterized by an unexhausted and tonic vitality. A fresco of the historical refuge of Bessarabian Romanians in front of the soviet invader as well as the ups and downs of their survival under the conditions of calamity history, Veneticii is at the same time a novel of family gynaeceum, that is of that social group fundamentally solidary in interests and connected through relations of consanguine ascendancy and descendancy that consolidates spiritually and volitionally, saving providentially not only as species, but implicitely as genre from extinction. Simplifing on a few lines rough sketch, one can say Veneticii is the saga of the family of the Bessarabia merchant on the bank of Dniester Grigore Ion Manu, a family obliged to leave everything behind and move to Oltenia, a land where it leaves not only the drama of uprooting and the humility of the „newcomer‟, but also the entire horror of the 45 years of totalitary communist regime.
In the complexity of a great fluid and galvanic text, where the words seem to connect to a melody in his being, as the author confesses, Veneticii has a relatively simple harmonious composition. Alternatively, in a rhythm entirely free of facts development or rememorizing some events in their life, of the clan or of the community, „the story‟ or perspective is now the woman‟s, (Vera, the home protector, wife and mother – a real symbol of patient memory), now the man‟s, Grigore, intrepid family head responsible with providing food for the seven mouths when he sits at a certain moment at the table, now the man‟s father in law, Timofei Hanganu, now „Mihail‟s uncle‟, Vera‟s brother, escaped from the German captivity, alive and unharmed, now Dona‟s, Grigore‟s ironic sister, now of elder children, now of a „voice‟ in the crowd. In the second part of the book, although the auctorial dominant voice of the „family scribe‟ that seems to assume the entire Romanian structure in a redeeming way but also as a message for the future (the raisonneur Andrei, the second child, who is only 4 years old, Vera left in wandering with, is now, in 1997, a mature man, married, owns his house, and is the father of a child himself), the productive method is largely the same, the only difference is that the fragments from Andrei´s journal inserted in a book have rather the role to enhance the degree of authenticity of the whole and to provide a more autobiographically pronounced turn.
Almost all cardinal characters of Ion Lazu‟s novel have in ancestors or descendants at least a correspondent of genetic variability and character typology extractor, a detail of morphology meant to punctuate a few defining features of a race of people within the nation in the end. For example, the consistent vocation of intrepid merchant, Grigore Manu, the head of the family, inherits undoubtedly from his father, a well-known wholesaler merchant of wines on the banks of Dniester and Chişinău. The distinction, the physical beauty and the moral intransigence of his brother in law Mihail, an officer purged by communists, seem to come from a very long time ago, from the shepards, his great grandparents, in the area of Neamţ who followed the herds of sheep up to the bank of Dniester where they set up dwellings. Dona‟s spright, witty and acid spirit – the bushy eyebrows and stumpy sister of the tall Grigore – is inherited and passes to Ancuţa, her niece, the only girl among the four boys and the two husbands. As a scribe of the family, noting a few things about each one of them (especially about parents, but also grandparents, uncles and brothers), Andrei gives up for a while to live his own life, being sure that in this way he makes justice to each and everyone…Only the long-enduring and wise Vera is unique and almost mythical. She is an exceptional character in the novel, of a richness of human feelings and a beauty of character entirely singular in Romanian literature. Too proud to enter into conflict with somebody, Vera Manu is, in
reality, the depository of fundamental features of the Bessabarian people, being ideally the mother, the prototype genitor of the race. Her life is a rich and profound song of the superior understanding of the ways of the world. Endowded with a rare sense of observation and an unexhausted power to take life from the beginning, giving the fact that when left barefoot, she has around her fellows, good, intelligent and sensitive, tenacious and hard working, Vera is a receptacle of life philosophy and the way of behaviour of the Romanian set for centuries between Prut and Dniester, who lived together in full harmony with the Russian and the Jew and with the German and the Pole and the Lippovan and with the South Bessarabean, borrowing from each of them and all in general everything that seemed to make his leaving better and more beautiful. The rather hostile, fierce and quarrelsome nature of Oltenia community under the communist regime, in the middle of which history threw her family in the second part of life, is for her as well as for her husband a permanent occasion to invoke in memory the „golden times‟, of what Basarabia was, that lost paradise with rich land and a benevolent world of a nation of proud and beautiful people who jumped unselfleshly to help in need. The paralelism between the sinful present („Cursed are these times we live in.‟), and the past full of crude poetry of places of a happy existence muffled the protagonists‟ feelings in Veneticii an epical note of implicit and deaf repugnancy. „… sensitized in the first childhood by the elegiac tone of father‟s stories, but also by mother‟s impenetrable silence, I recently got to upset the pre-established order of things and say: indeed, the tempestuous leave from Bessarabia made them unhappy, being away from the native land filled continually in their souls mourning and yearning, but on the other side, these uprooted people had something to think about: in their fight against life vexations there was always for them a salutary reference point; they had something to remember – some places he wanted to see again and could not see them again, some relatives and fellow villagers and friends he wanted to meet and he couldn‟t. And, thus, their youth on the bank of Dniester gained an ideal aura, like a lost paradise‟.The Bessarabia Romanian, also a refugee, Ion Lazu, (originary from the commune Ciubârciu, the county Tighina, from parents Grigore and Vera!) made from the main female character of his novel obviously a recognizable symbol to a great extent, at least for me, of the most tried Bessarabia woman that I myself admired especially in my youth, when I met her as a school-mistress somewhere in Bărăgan, as a „fiscal agent‟ in Dâmboviţa, as a simple housekeeper at around 150 km from the capital or the omniscient Apuseni woman in remote North-West of Romanian territory. Vera and her voluntary husband, as we may think, claims in the passionate concert of brass ware in Veneticii the score of an incredible intonation freshness of poem-like exposure of the flute alto: „And again, right in the middle of the plane, the unexpected pink of some apricot tree, as if put on purpose there, to ask yourself what it is with it… (…). The earth is brown¸ between the greasy furrows there is still water, a little fog lifts or comes down from the sky, one does not know if the plain exhales vapours – or perhaps that the earth absorbs from the air the humidity which it missed so much… In the middle of a grazing land, two skinny horses, with thin horse tails; their bones pushed through the cast skin prints letters that seem to signal: Let the fertile grass we need so much spring! Further, two-three deep holes, like fierce bites, incomprehensible. A wolfman swallowed a few morsels of clay, wrenched off with greed, so that it allays the hearburn in the belly, where it gathered poison for all the ill deeds planned, from now to infinity‟. In brackets, we underlie the striking character of the realism of Ion Lazu‟s descriptions, as well as the expresionist metaphorical wave of the poetry of feeling it offers, cum grano salis, an aura of an very sonorous aesthetism; sometimes, besides our exemple, taken almost at random, the contagious heartfelt humanism note his ideea awalys bears can not escape to the reader. Noble, lucid and dreamy, the topic so nicely sonorous but reserved of the flute blends with serious interventions, sometimes unattended canonically, of the hautboy or bassoon (Grigore), to be re-exposed and developed largely, on the background of other instruments of accompaniament, in the suave tone of „lah‟ of the primo-clarinet, prevailing in the end (Andrei).
Without being afraid I might be wrong, I shall signal to the reader in Ion Lazu‟s remarkable novel Veneticii, an author topic for the first time treated in our literature namely the historical refuge of Basarabean Romanians since 1944 and the odyssey of their survival. Running as a large and lazy stream, written with maximum attention, and severely controlled at the idea level, somewhat situated at the limit of stylistic accuracy of a vaguely symbolic channel, Veneticii is one of the first 10 novels written in our country during the last twenty years.
Translator: Zenovia Popa
Proofreader: Rodica Ionaş
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