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Catalin Dorian Florescu
Der kurze Weg nach Hause
(The Way Back Home)
Pendo, August 2002. 244 pp. This is a post-Communist novel, narrated from a viewpoint the reverse of the frequently-told tale of escape to the West. The main character is also the narrator, whose family fled to Switzerland when he was a child. He lists the staging posts and explores his feelings during a journey of rediscovery to his birthplace in Romania. His travelling companion, an Italian friend from his schooldays in Zurich, is an unmitigated scamp and chancer called Luca, whose unsettling influence the narrator takes a long time to throw off. The action begins in the coastal resort of Mangalia, not identified but presumably in Romania, where, in a pattern repeated throughout the book, Luca has disappeared in pursuit of a local girl. Next comes a flashback of life in Zurich, where the Romanian families exist in poor style while ironically their relatives back at home are convinced that they are living royally. The two young men are obsessed by American films, scenes from which they often act out. Luca, the always successful hero, and the narrator, the anti-hero, live theatrically through their love affairs - none of which is ever like those in the movies. They engage in the open-air drug culture of the streets and speak in the crude language of their peers. Graphic scenes of the sordid, drug-ridden areas alternate with lyrical descriptions of lakes with boats bobbing on the water and other glimpses of the country-side. A contrasting flashback recalls the narrator's childhood in Soviet-dominated Romania, with a top-loading washing machine in the family's bathroom which made sounds like colonic rumblings. When, finally, the pair reach Timisoara, where his family once lived, the narrator finds his uncle in the last throes of death from alcoholism and records the scene with devastating black humour: 'Anyway he wasn't dead yet, just not quite really alive … we sat in front of the sofa on chairs, three chairs, three people and a fourth, who wouldn't die … you could always put the coins on later'.
Here is Ian McEwen, but with far greater humour, irony and salt. A unique overview of life in Eastern Europe during and just after the last days of Soviet rule.
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