In the last September issue, the magazine Letras Libres published this review of past projects of Ana Blandiana , signed by J. Ernesto Ayala-Dip : On one occasion, Gabriel García Márquez asked him where he got his materials from vast imagination. More or less literally the Colombian writer said that in Latin America in the nineteenth century, there was a general who had lost all his battles, or almost all. That to happen, not that it dismiss the general, it was more worthy of a great review than a page of the true story of a country, and yet the story was not the product of fantasy. Always, as we know from the portentous political allegory that is Gulliver's Travels, the fantasy, the fantastic, is an extremely reasonable attempt to amend the serious shortcomings of the human condition or social and political systems that seek men . This little preamble comes to mind (pun intended) of the publication of the book of accounts of Romanian writer Ana Blandiana past projects.
ideological In times of hardship, such as occurred during the totalitarian regimes calls socialist republics of Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, the appeal to fantasy literature, or any other kind of hyperbole to make ellipses or its rationale, was more than the cultivation of the imagination more extreme was simply the only narrative method can circumvent the system ferrous ideological and aesthetic control of the Commissioners of proletarian censorship. As mentioned the famous book of Jonathan Swift, let's quote another in the same wake, Animal Farm by George Orwell. The furious criticism of the communist system that makes Orwell from his book is well summarized in one sentence has already made history: On the farm, "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." Years later, the author of 1984 said that Animal Farm was the first book that attempted to "fuse the political and artistic intention in everything." And here my point. Ana Blandiana (his real name is Otilia Valeria Coman, 1942) brings together eleven stories in which the guiding element is the transfiguration of the bleak reality in fantasy. That step between worlds with different laws, that sort of tunnel Cortazarian where an area begins and ends in another, that mirror of Lewis Carroll, the writer Romania acquires the dimension of a literature of ideological unmasking. We are not in the ontological decoding of stories and novels of Kafka, his guilt past and future, although similar weather and a certain feeling of helplessness, we are simply to the literary representation of a shameful injustice of state, non-judgmental representation or sanctions: only, nothing more and nothing less, describe and naked. The title story provides volume, "past projects" is one of the saddest stories I read in a long time. And also one of the highest artistic invoice. Its subject is moving (as well noted and studied for its prologue and one of the translators, Viorica Patea) in this amazing line of natural, in this land of reality more palpable until he suddenly discovered the terrible abyss, without necessarily the story, as an artifact of fiction, the subtlest change acknowledgment one-third that occurs between the lines and that will rule until the end. There is a wedding, a wedding, some guests and are suddenly arrested all (this happens in Communist Romania) and sent to a sort of no man's land. Are suddenly anyone. Banished to a piece of territory that will have to build, build, where to raise their children, and for ten long years to return to the socialist civilization. Story within a story This story is frightening because it could not happen, but it happened and inevitably will continue to happen. Another element that is not lower in the story is impossible to understand. And the inability to reliably reconstruct the events of the past. In this story, also there is a narrator (we read) that in turn listen to another teller, who lived the story of the ill-fated wedding. Well, the moral dilemma arises when we least expected: it is he who suffered forced displacement can not escape the memory of the inhuman acts. It is your personal epic, is owned and as such need, as if unwilling to prosecute their captors. Just remember that he was a hero, who survived. As if the least important was the nature and origin of hell. And do not miss the reader the story "Birds flying for consumption." And "The church ghost." Two pieces of a wide-ranging compositional intelligence. In the first, the metaphor for the spiritual in a deadly scheme for the existence of angels, and in the other, a treatise on the status of fiction in that perennial debate in which one party insists on making us believe that do not exist in general really do not win any battles.
0 comments:
Post a Comment